


Spice

by AmyWilldo



Category: Much Ado About Nothing - Shakespeare, Original Work, The Expanse Series - James S. A. Corey
Genre: F/F, F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-22
Updated: 2020-07-22
Packaged: 2021-02-28 21:08:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 36
Words: 63,551
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23253721
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AmyWilldo/pseuds/AmyWilldo
Summary: It's not love that moves the stars, now that humanity has taken them, it's trade. It's the haves and have nots. It's the secrets. It's the little things.Vesta isn't a place where there's much to have, or much to trade, but it's theirs, and what they have, they'll hold.It's not a place for softness, or pity, or second chances.
Relationships: Beatrice/Benedick (Much Ado About Nothing), Claudio/Hero (Much Ado About Nothing)
Kudos: 6





	1. The way it happened goes like this: 2252

**Author's Note:**

> A remix of Much Ado people, set in and stealing from the trade issues in The Expanse universe pre the Gates. 
> 
> Vesta is the second biggest asteroid in the Asteroid Belt of our solar system, between Mars and Jupiter. It has some massive craters, and is suitable for drilling - no atmosphere of its own, so that air is precious, and low grav, and ice in patches, if you're lucky, with a maximum external temperature of -19C (255K).   
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4_Vesta
> 
> in this story, the Vesta colony is constructed mostly in underground tunnels, with heat traps to bring the temperature up to a much balmier 5C, if everyone remembers to close all the seals, and dugout rooms, with a maglev train connecting habs and providing gravity, and all sealed air-tight, with one large domed area on the surface on which crops are grown. One of the principal features of its economy is as a port for trade, for ice-haulers, and the other as a repair station.  
> Juanita and Marcia have the most popular refrectory deep in the tunnels, partly because the only other is the minimal caf at the port where ships dock. Tamsin, their daughter, is a gifted bio-tech who tinkers with synthesising the flavours that make food worth eating. Benita, her cousin, isn't and doesn't. She wants to leave, to fix her ship and run for the black.
> 
> Podraig is a junior navigator on the Styx, an ice miner. Cantor, Captain Hay's son, is his roommate, and junior pilot, and content with the upward trajectory that his post, and his parent, guarantees. For Pod, there aren't guarantees, and he's got to push his chances. All of them.

She was working in the refrect, the yellow lights dimming as the time wore on, the refrect as bare as a rock, the one regular from the other side of the station sitting at the same stool, and nursing the same bottom drinking beer she always did. Waiting out the clock. Waiting on her pay check from her aunts. Waiting on the end of her internship, down the docks, on her ticket out and up. The same audio twittered in the background as had been on rotation for the last 40 days, she could sing ahead of the beat, if she didn’t stop herself, she would. 

The door sliding open burst the seal. A swell of voices preceded the sweat, and the regular squeezed herself out through the blacksuited throng, rolling her eyes, edging her orange jumpsuit through the loudness. For that instant, the muzak dimmed and the cacophony of voices prevailed, and her hand stilled, and the water from the sink crept up her arms. A captain, from the stripes on her shoulder, and several officers, and a bevy of younger uniformed kids, her age. Boys and girls who’d already made it out into the black, one step ahead. Not that she was jealous. Not more than would be normal. She pressed the buttons under the bar that would flare up the alarms in the boss’s quarter, her aunt liked to know when a new captain entered, and the other one that flagged potential customers to Meg, and Urtz and Ned, and told herself to smile. 

Bulbs of beer, bulbs of beer, one shot of vod, and two waters. A crew fairly uniform in their tastes, and in their appearances. Shorter than the station dwellers, and more white, white teeth smiling across from her, blond hair, and cleft chins, and blue eyes as if they’d all been baked in the same factory, and fairly happy drunks, with no one riled up, or looking to rile, not that there were any locals there to pick fights with in the first place, a slow, if loud, night. Urtz found a partner, and faded out, and Meg and Ned circled, looking for a gravity well but not landing quite yet. Cards being given out with the code for payment, with a twinkling smile and a bump of the hip, a touch of the hand across the shoulder, as simple as that. Juanita, making happy with Captain Hay, tonight your money’s no good, yours neither Quartermaster Verde, just come back with your crew, just come back and spend time with us, remember us next time you need a meal, a drink, a place to stay, supply contract for our special vat grown proteins, proprietary formula, hope you like it, and her other adoptive mother, her aunt Marcia watching from the door to the kitchen, working her magic with the proteins. Little bits of the Earther spices, smuggled and paid for and charged at premium, and all flying out from the kitchen damn quick, likely all gone by the end of the shift and none left for the station. 

Past the end of her shift, and well and truly, not that Juan would care, not with this crowd. The customers didn’t, and the number of bulbs for recycling grew, and the smile she had plastered on would have grown less, but for the one thing. It wasn’t like she hadn’t had her share of smiles, up until this point, the point at which at nineteen standard, Juan would trust her to run a shift solo, and developed methods of dealing with them. It was just that he wouldn’t stop staring. Didn’t stop smiling. Not a wide toothed grin, like the rest of the blue-eyed crew, but one that looked like he was in on a private joke with her, one he’d tell her about later. Brown curly hair, milky brown skin lighter than hers, and no cleft chin, and a face that was more interesting than pretty, and you wouldn’t call it that unless the dimples were showing because he was smiling, which he was. A crooked eyebrow, with a scar above and through it, slightly raised, as he watched his colleagues spoon in their meals, not interrupting the shouts from table to table, and always second priority to the bulbs of beer, and seemingly part of all the conversations, tipping into them and out as he chose, but not committing to any one, firmly rooted at the bar stool, and looping back his light blue eyes to hers, like the centre of a circle, and somehow, she’d find herself blushing intermittently, as she’d notice, and then stop noticing and notice again.

Stubble on the chin, and he was young enough, her age, that she’d bet he’d left it on purposefully, in a crew of his elders. Stubble of hair on his head, solid neck, like a wrestler, shorter than his colleagues, and indicating he was bearing the brunt of the spacewalks, and low man on the pole, for the moment, and she wondered if he minded. She wanted to touch it, and see whether it tickled her palms.

Meg swatted her backside, and bumped her out of the bar, finally, only an hour past time, and Juan nodded her out. Cracked her back, as discreetly as she could, and found him still watching. Thought to herself, well and why not? Perhaps it could be as simple as that. Asked him if he wanted to stretch his legs, and found herself a path to the outside, and down the hall, and hypersensitive to the sound of his footsteps next to hers, and his body heat radiating in the chill. Footsteps off, like a syncopated beat.

He talked incessantly. About everything. She learnt that he was a standard older than her, and that his name was Podraig, Pod to his friends, one of which he hoped she’d be, and that he was in training to be a navigator, and that he’d once had a mother that he travelled with, who’d died down a gravity well, during a supply run, and that he’d never been to that planet again. She would have told him about her parents, but there was no space in the conversation in which to speak. Looking back now, older Benita wants to shake Ben, and tell her that she should have paid attention to that red flag, but young Ben was charmed, enchanted, enthralled at having a story enfold her in the details, and warmed by his exuberance, and convinced that the unburdening was special, made him special. In her memory, Podraig talked long and smoothly about his crewmates, and the warmth of family where you built it, and made young Ben long for the companionship that surely she’d have, if only she shipped out with him. Long and eloquent about the problems that were developing between the inner planets, and the space dwellers, and traders, and the disadvantages that the current trade deals had, and made young Ben feel hopelessly inadequate, only ever having thought in the short term about the impact on the refrect, and more recently on the port maintenance facilities, as it pertained to her life. Made her feel impressed, when older Benita knows now that young Pod was surely respouting the views of Captain Hay, and the crewroom briefings. At the time, it had seemed uncommonly smart. Impressive. Something she could only aspire to, if she paid more attention to the local politics, and her aunt Marcia. Which, as it happened, older Benita admits that she had subsequently, and not regretted it, but that this had nothing to do with Podraig. 

Older Benita would have told young Ben not to do it, if she’d been asked. Not to slip her hand into his, as if accidental, and not to lead him back to the side door, the one that led to the staff quarters of the refrect, and not to, once he’d taken breath and paused in the speech he was making about the dearth of entertainment on board, and the latest book he was reading, the Decameron, from a time well before space opened up, and the recounting of stories by a group trapped in an ancient house to wait out the plague, kiss him mid sentence, take him by surprise, kiss him long and soft, and open mouthed, until there could be no mistaking that she wanted him to come into her rooms, and why. Older Benita would have told young Ben that the speed at which young Pod took her up on her offer, took her into her cold quarters, the light playing over the ceiling as if they were underwater instead of inside rock, and took off her clothes, and his prosthetic foot, and took his ease with her was an indication of a long space flight, with no intra crew buddy privileges, and not an indication of how much he wanted her in particular, not a sign that he was endeared, enchanted, ensnared himself. That the way in which he’d looked embarrassed afterwards, and trailed his hands down her body, leaving chills, and pinpricks of sensation in their wake, and crooked his fingers inside and around her until she’d shivered herself into silence, was no more than what a polite partner should be doing, and not a source of endearment. Young Ben, sweaty and gasping, and fully awake, as Podraig drifted into a slightly open-mouthed slumber, one arm under her head, and the other arm over her stomach, lay still and watched him breathe. Found herself being kissed awake, and that the second time was infinitely better than the first, that he watched her with the same intensity as he had at the bar, and that in bed there was no lying about how much she liked that, and he liked her liking it and that he’d learnt well from the first and extrapolated from that with intensity, to good effect, and that he was capable of waiting, and that the end of it all was now, this point when she came apart around him and older Benita would have had nothing to say about any of that. Still didn’t. 

Young Ben had drifted there afterwards, with him intertwined even more closely, and imagined a future with the two of them on a ship, and shared quarters, and matching tattoos, and a life together. Stared at his face, in the night, and memorised his nose, traced his jaw with a gentle finger. Listened to him murmur about her eyes shining brighter than the sun coming up around a moon. A feeling better than freefall. Tried to commit the moment into deep storage. Older Benita shakes her head at how young she’d been. How hopeful.

She remembered that she’d had a morning session down at the docks to get to, and that his arms had found their way around her, and she’d thought about blowing it off. Older Benita shakes her head in memory, that she’d thought about upsetting her future, all for a boy, and his warm arms. Young Ben had tickled his ribs until Pod had woken, and kissed him properly awake, and, finding that waking had had a predictable effect, squirmed her way down his body, and listened to him groan as she took him in her mouth. Felt pride at the sounds he made, that she was making him make, the gentle fisting of her hair in his hands, and a stirring inside that she had no time to take care of, if she was going to make it out the door on time, cleaned and clothed. After, she’d climbed her way back up his body, memorising his ribs, the sparse hair on his chest, and kissed him on the cheek. Told him he’d have to leave. 

Older Benita winces, remembering all too well his words. He’d started well and all. Wanting, he said, to bottle this feeling, better than the cool of oxygen when you’re low. That if he could, he’d make a nest of his arms and keep her there forever, and all the black space be damned to it. That he hadn’t know it could be this way. The way he’d put his fingers to her mouth with a shake of his head, and a flush of his cheek and not met her eye when she’d tried to tell him the same, in words less eloquent but not less true. When she’d said again that she had to get to work. The way she remembers it playing from here, is that Pod asked whether he had to talk to her, or Juan, about keeping her for the rest of the docking time, and that he was good for the money. Keeping her, as if she was for hire. The slow embarrassment of understanding. The way in which she’d pushed herself away from the bed, her bed, as if there was an oxygen fire she needed to contain, to close the door on, and let burn out by itself. 

She’d floated briefly, naked, by the bed, hands on hips, hair tangled and haloed about her head, his sweat still drying on her body, and felt like she was blushing from head to toe, and for all she knew, she was. Older Benita doesn’t blush anymore. She thinks she doesn’t blush anymore, but it’s more likely she doesn’t let herself get into situations like that, anymore.

Young Ben fought more easily than older Benita, and with less thought. Less tact. She’d said things like, he was a straight up invitation to recycle, that people had been spaced for less, that anyone selling their personal services, their time, like he thought she was, would have outlined a basic rate card before any services have been offered, basic common sense, and if that was what he’d been looking for, she could have handed him to Meg on a silver platter, or Ned for that matter, and now she wouldn’t invite him to have a drink at their refrect without ensuring he’d understood it wasn’t an invitation for anything else, that if he’d taken a minute to think he’d have understood that, and that if he was in training to be a navigator, he needed a course in landmarks and common sense first, and that there was the door, and he should use it. He’d turned paler than Tamsin. Paler than Marcia’s custard. 

He'd tried to apologise, she remembers that, but Older Benita is still proud of the way in which she’d shoved him out, throwing his suit, his boots and his foot after him, drifting through the air like lost birds, after his naked arse. The slam of the door. Still smug about the way in which he must have presented himself to his crewmates, after walking through the hallways, and the way in which she’d seen him slink back into the refrect with his crewmates, sitting this time at a table, and not at the bar, and only looking at her when she wasn’t looking at him, and the scald of the redness of his cheeks and the wince of the way in which he took his seat speaking volumes as to the experience of being in close to negative temperatures unclad. The fumbled apology, later at the bar, when her aunts weren’t there, at least a proper one where he actually apologised for hurting her, and not an apology for any offense he might have caused, and during which she stared him down, until he left, never to be forgiven. The way in which she’d found her way into any conversation he’d been in, and shot him down, without mercy. He’d started an anecdote with his peers about the maths drills he’d been asked to do, and the unfairness of life in general, and she’d invited him to swap jobs with her, and learn maths the hard way, down the docks, remembering tolerances and leakage management. If he thought he was good for the money. He’d blushed under the stubble, and she’d felt a tingle of victory. His face, jaw dropped, with the double impact of knowing she could beat him at something, and that she had. Just now. 

She’d felt smug, too, about the way in which she’d kept his shirt, and slept in it, as a trophy. Alternatively, on weaker nights, as a reminder of the way in which she’d felt that second time, allowing herself to remember for a minute his eyes on her before it went bad, as if she was the only person that mattered to him in the entire ‘verse. The possibility of love. Older Ben still had the shirt, but would have denied the love, and been believed. Older Benita denies also that she remembers the night in such detail. That it pops into her head at awkward times, the curve of his lips on her shoulder. The way in which he’d sighed as her fingers traced his ribs, and the half moan, half growl in her ear when she climbed his body and sank down like fingers into the mud dust that forms around the drill bit. It was, Older Benita maintains, a night to be forgotten.


	2. Getting of wisdom: 2253

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sometimes you get lucky. Except there's no such thing as luck, just hard work and persistence. Plus a bit of, well, luck.

Thrust is not his friend, he’d like to remind Cantor. He would remind him, but they’re under heavy burn, and the effort of talking isn’t worth it. Plus, it’s his fault that they’re under heavy burn, he plotted it out himself, and if there’s an arse to be kicked by Podraig, it’s Podraig’s own. Not that he can reach his own arse, because of the heavy burn on the turn, it’s pressed but firmly into the nav couch.

  
He thumbs out the message instead, and Cantor responds with an inappropriate emoji. Then the number 5, down to 4, to 3, to 2 and then the couch releases him from the overly restrictive cushioning, and the thrust is over. He’d be taller if it weren’t for these thrusts. Not that he wants to be taller.

Cantor flicks the switch into auto, and Pod takes the first deep breath he’s had in minutes. The course holds true, he sees on the heads up, and they’re on approach for the next target. He’s invested in this, it’s a target he’s picked, it should be iron rich, there should be ice, and he’s dead in the water if it’s not. As in, he’ll be back down a rank, and that’s the last place he wants to be. He won’t know until the away crew start the drill, and between then and now is a period over which he has no control. It’s all in Cantor’s hands, and they’re such young hands, now that he looks at them properly. Cantor’s a mere babe. A child. The captain’s child, however, and there’s all the difference. A sweet lad, though. And quick on the reflexes, which is what you want in a pilot. Not needed in a navigator, which is where his sights lie. His mother would have been proud, but he’s no idea whether his father would have been. His father’s never been anywhere to be proud or disappointed of him either way. And to hell with him too, fathers are overrated, or so he’s told Cantor, who lost his early. A hero, nonetheless. A pilot to end them all, and it had ended him.

The cabin seems suddenly larger, and everyone’s talking. He can hear the chatter from the crew decks below, bouncing against the grain walls, the machinery softly humming in the background, the random beeps that punctuate the conversation. The stars that punctuate the black. The asteroid that’s growing gradually bigger on the screen, jagged crags, rubble, and dirt encrusted mystery.

“Not much of a looker, Pod, your asteroid,” says Hay mildly.

“He’s got the personality where it counts,” says Pod, trying to keep the irk out. She’s every right to challenge him, she’s captain, and he’s trying to prove himself, and by the heavens outside, he hopes it’s going to deliver. “Besides, it’s what’s on the inside, not the outside, that matters.”

“Better not be too far on the inside,” says Verde. It won’t be, damn his eyes, Pod thinks, but doesn’t say. The quartermaster has a temper, and no sense of humour. Pod hates his balding head, and his paunching gut, and the way he looks at a person, like he’s rendering them down for meat and fat and minerals, the same way he’s looking at Pod’s asteroid now. Still, doesn’t signify, not when Cantor has them on final approach, and the crew’s anxious to get down and get started.

There’s a bump and another one, and Verde looks like he’s about to start something when Hay clears her throat. Pointedly.

The mike is cold in his hand. It’s the first time they’ve burnt fuel on his plotting, the previous targets have been ones called out by his predecessor, the lovely and sensible and very much disembarked Frieda, left as a parting gift. She’d liked to puzzle out likely targets on her downshifts, because sleeping wasn’t something that her body was interested in anymore. Her targets were iron rich. Palladium. Rare metals. She had a gift for sniffing them out that bordered on the arcane, and she played up to it. She had a tattoo on her shoulder of a new moon, creased in the wrinkled skin so that it eclipsed and rose when she moved. A sleeve tattoo on her leg that memorialised the Carina nebula, and one more on her wrist of an old-fashioned compass rose, small and discreet. He has nothing, because he doesn’t feel he’s earnt it, yet. For the whole year that they’d worked together, he knows none of the stories that lead to any of those inks. His elder, his better, and not a target for teasing out the personal. He knows the information he needs to know, hopefully, to pull out the targets from the dry rocks, and this will be the test.

He clicks the mike on. “Team away when ready. Good hunting, all.”

He clicks it back off, and listens to the clanking of metal on metal, the hiss of gases moving about, and the mining equipment being unloaded. There’s nothing more he can do, and he feels empty. Light. As light as on Vesta, before he’d gained the scar and guilt that anchors him down. The moment, the stupid words, his head chooses to play him back every time he thinks he’s a decent guy at heart, to remind him he’s not.

“Take a nap,” Hay advises Cantor. “Second Nav Officer, I want to see the course to the next target, if this one comes up short. You can sleep after.”

He’s done it already, of course, because he’s paranoid. He’s planned for three, on the basis that there’s always a way to fuck up beyond the reasonable. He’s good at that, the planning, when he knows the parameters for success. When he knows what counts as failure. But he nods, and takes a stand. “It’ll be done, Captain. It won’t be short, but if it is, I’ll have the next one ready.” He can feel his gut clenching up in knots. Can feel Verde’s eyes watching his breathing, and he wills it to slow down. “Relax. It’s under control. Trust me. Have I ever let you down before?”

Leaves the room before Verde can answer that he’s never had the opportunity to try.

The time crawls like gas escaping from a slow leak, and he deflates with it. In the first hour, he’d planned out a dozen cutting comments to rub in Verde’s face when the team arrived back, gleeful at a heavy haul. In the next hour, he was convinced that the time they were taking was indicative of a poor one, and was drawing up new ways of earning a credit. Anything with hard labour out. Anything on Vesta out. The list awfully short. The final hour raced.

The blessed sound of clanking hull door, and airlock in, airlock out, and then the sweeter sound of a happy crew, and he’s done it, he’s made his bones. He’s not even going to ask. Okay, he’s probably going to ask, but he’ll do it after an appropriate length of time to show that he was positive on the result all along. Okay, he’s going to go and ask now. This is a good day.  



	3. Intra: 2253.4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which a connection is made

Styx: My predecessor wanted me to say thank you. I mean, for her years and your safe handling. So, thank you.

Vesta: I’m only just new myself, Styx. I can’t take more than your last visit’s worth of credits. But thanks. And you shouldn’t tell me it’s a her. Retain the mystery, Styx. It’s half the fun.

Styx. Ah.

Vesta. Ah, indeed. Download initiate, please?

Styx. Initiated. It’s not a very interesting one this trip. Sorry. Next time.


	4. Something on the screen that shouldn’t be there: 2254

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> worrying about what's out there isn't his job, and so he doesn't. He's doing his job and he's exhausted.

He spends his down time churning through the charts, burning the numbers into his head so that when he’s sitting on deck, on shift, they float in front of his eyes, and he knows without checking whether the Styx is on course or if he needs to gently nudge Cantor into an adjustment. Tonight, there’s no need. In the olden, olden days, people had to memorise logarithms, square roots, so he was told by Frieda. He reckons that he has his down. He’s blown up the screen res time and time again, and his eyes still burn at the end of each shift. Perhaps he shouldn’t be spending his down time on screen either. But he has a reputation to uphold. The problem with being good is that you have to continue to be good. All the time. The pie eating contest where the reward is more pie, that you have to cook yourself. It’s a good thing he likes the work. He’s mapped out more asteroids than he thought was possible, in the days when he was still second nav officer. All of the asteroids, all of the time. He’s been lucky, more often than not, not that he’d admit to the element of luck that flows into it. Frieda admitted to luck, but only to him. 

Captain Hay doesn’t need to know about the luck, no. Captain Hay needs to believe in his skill. Quartermaster Verde needs to take a long spacewalk without his helmet, preferably with his shadow Salve following tightly behind. Kim Sorrento can stay. Before, when he was second nav officer, and before that, perhaps it was luck, perhaps it was that the universe was a more peaceful place, and perhaps it was better awareness of the vectors in the sector, and an instinct about staying out of the lane, but there’d been no need for Kim, and he’d been the dark and broody presence, who’d play endless games of spider solitaire on his console, waiting for something, anything, to happen. Now, Kim is the silent guru of the cross hairs, who keeps them all safe, and shoots to kill, and they have to restock not only food and fuel, but the missiles, and the laser system needs more regular upkeep. Cantor tells him, but Pod really doesn’t want to know, that the Captain and Kim share a bunk in down time. It’s none of Pod’s business. Cantor likes to guess. Cantor likes to gossip. The fact that it’s about his mother is odd. Not that he bothers telling Cantor that any more. Cantor won’t be told.

Tonight, there’s no gossip. Tonight, he’s got a feeling that they’re not the only ship out in this sector, and the target’s so tempting, so rich, that he bets there’ll be trouble. He’s voiced this, not in terms of feeling, but in terms of percentages, and risk, to Hay, and Hay is playing the odds. Kim’s not overly happy with this. Kim likes the game, as he calls it, well enough, but only when the odds are right, and although he won’t say it outright, the way in which he’s twisting in his chair tells Pod the story well enough too. At least until Hay calls him on it and sends him down to the war room, you know, just in case. The war room has more ports from which to view the surrounds, and screens are no substitute for eyeballs, is what Kim says, when you’re trying to zero in. Less crucial for flying, says Cantor, and pats his monitor fondly. 

The room’s smaller with Kim gone. But louder, because there’s a constant stream of chat between him, Hay and Cantor. Podraig would bunk down, but Hay requires all officers be present when they’re on mission. He’s his head propped discreetly on his hand, and his elbow wedged firmly into his chair, and if his eyes happen to drift closed more often than not, as the stream of chat continues to wash over him, it’s neither here nor there. If they’re fired on, there will be nothing for him to do, unless everything’s gone wrong, there’s no navigating out of a fire fight. No magic space warping he can do, no pixie sprinkle dust he can pull out. The first time they were in a battle, his stomach soured with adrenalin, and he was more awake than he liked, holding on for dear life every time Cantor decided to course correct too violently, every time Kim shouted into the mike. Now, he dozes, half awake and half not. When he’s awake, he records what they’ve been doing, who they’ve traded to, and for how much, what they’ve mined, and how much, who shot first, and second and third, and how much. Once in the ship’s log as a supplement to the Captain’s log, because she does like verification from a secondary source if she’s ever put to task by her trade partners, or worse still, a planetfall inspector, and once on the dead drop that automatically uploads when they’re in range of a repeater. The dead drop that Frieda set up, or her predecessor and he’s inherited. Not really reluctantly, because he’s of the view that someone should know about what’s going on out here, but not at the time enthusiastically either. Not at that time, before they’d had one too many run ins with an Earth space nav representative, insisting that they view the Captain’s trade logs, that she confirm the amount of trade and the tariffs paid to which planets for which colonies, and more often than not insisting she’d fallen short, and then no one has a bonus. Not at that time, before the Earth space nav had accidentally on purpose fired a little too close and damaged their hull, claiming that there’d been a weapons malfunction. Weapons malfunction his left foot indeed. Now, he views it as a duty that’s more important than sleep. Takes a secret pleasure out of knowing that things are uploading under the noses of the space navy, and that he’s helping with the cause of freedom, of free trade and free living, although he doesn’t want to know any more about the cause beyond that. 

There’s nothing left to report on at the moment, though. Not until the dot on the screen resolves itself into a friend or a foe, and he can either close the books on this encounter until they land on the asteroid and start the mining, or start with the writing, on the basis of the screens and Kim and Cantor’s swearing commentary. Either way, he’s having a nap.


	5. Intra:2254

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> it's gossip, it's nothing, it doesn't matter

Vesta: I’m hoping for something a little more exiting, Styx. Have you been a busy ship, Styx? Inquiring minds need to know. 

Styx: I’m retaining my air of mystery, you saucy minx. Allow me my veils, or at least the couple of minutes before you read the file and bounce it up to the sat link. 

Vesta: I don’t believe you’re wearing a veil. Opaqued helms are where it’s at. Not that I can see you anyway. 

Styx: You do know I was being all metaphorical and what not. I can see it’s being wasted on you, so I’ll go ahead and tell you. Captain’s young son, Cantor, our pilot trainee, has been pining after a girl on your station. Now you can go ahead and tell me that every Vestan already knows, and it’s been the talk of the town, and I’ve wasted your time telling you what you already know. Heaven forfend.

Vesta: No. we don’t spend our days talking about you when you’re gone. Unless you do something spectacularly interesting when you’re here. There’s only been one of those ever and it wasn’t Cantor that did it.

Styx: Ah. I’m going to guess that it’s something to do with a naked Styx crewman. Is that the one?

Vesta: The very. The whys and wherefores now lost in the annals of time, as in, it’s been more than a year, so who cares. The image retained of the bare arsed crewman remains. Someone claimed to have a photo, but no one’s seen it. 

Styx: shame.

Vesta: Indeed. We live in hope every time you return that it’s going to be repeated.

Styx: I can’t imagine anyone making that same mistake twice. 

Vesta: indeed. Download’s done. See you on the flip side.


	6. Intra: 2254.6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> in which a friendship is built

Styx: I’m so very, very bored. Nothing of any interest at all on the download this six months. Except…

Vesta: Except what?

Styx: No. it’s of no interest. Forget I said anything.

Vesta: Tell me.

Vesta: Tell me now.

Vesta: Tell me please.

Vesta: If I knew who you were, I’d hunt you down. Pretty please with sugar on top and I’ll throw in some cinnamon experimental synth if you’re quick about it.

Styx: Bringing out the big guns! That’s what I like. Particularly in an imaginary bet on which you’ll never have to pay out. Mmm, imaginary synth cinnamon. The best kind. It’s almost as if you know I’ve had nothing but vat meat and sturdy flavourless boring rubble for months. Tease.

Vesta: That’s what we’re counting on here. Now the thing I don’t know?

Styx: We hit triple pay dirt. Water ice, plus iron, plus rare metals. Hay’s shouting us all the good stuff tonight at the refrect. I’m going to have the real stuff. All the flavours, and none of the boring.

Vesta: Congratulations! Except

Styx: Except what?

Vesta: Well.

Vesta: The thing is. 

Styx: The thing is what? What?

Vesta: Earth cut off the supply of the real stuff. We’re fresh out. We’ve got limited synth, and it’s got more flavour than any other station’s going to give you, but only limited amounts. You didn’t hear it from me. We’re working on it. And by we, I mean our green team. And by our green team, I mean mostly Tamsin. She’s only young, but she runs circles around the rest of them. But she’s only young, and there’s only so much she can do. So, if you want any flavours, you need to get in quick when you land. You didn’t hear it from me, obviously.

Styx: God bless you for an angel. Or rather, my tongue thanks you in advance. I can’t afford the prices they’re charging now, either the legal or the black market, and after a stint in the black, the vat grown stuff is like eating cotton wool. You define customer care, Vesta. If I knew who you were, I’d share it with you. 

Vesta: Hush now.

Styx: Besides, I couldn’t name you as a source. I don’t even know your name.

Vesta: And that’s how I like it. All cats are grey in the dark.


	7. 2255

Styx: This time, I’m not lying to you. It’s been a dull trip. We hit up asteroids, and we mined, and we’ve got a full cargo, and nothing went wrong. Nothing observed that was untoward. Verde continues to spout his Earther loyalist nonsense, but there’s nothing new in that. Nothing true in that. I’m sorry, Vesta. Would you like me to tell you a story instead?

Vesta: I don’t know why we have these chats, Styx. The automatic relay’s working fine for the drop of your log. You’ve never anything terribly exciting to tell me anyway. It’s all mouth and no trousers with you. And now, you’re offering to tell me a bedtime story? Dull is the word.

Styx: I like to think I’m not dull in bed. I’ve not had any complaints, not lately anyhow. My stories are sought after, I’ll have you know. I have a very nimble tongue.

Vesta: Do you now. Shouldn’t you wait for people to tell you that you’re charming and ah, nimble?

Styx: I don’t generally have to wait. It happens organically. 

Vesta: Organically. Well now. There’s a thing. Do you, in point of fact, have any stories to tell me?

Styx: No. You’ll have to take the nimble tongue on faith. If ever we meet, I’ll demonstrate.

Vesta: If ever we meet, you’ll have to.


	8. 2255.6

Vesta: New strain of virus last month. Lost three people. The mood’s a little fractious. Fair warning. Hope you’ve all had your shots, or at least an IG booster.

Styx: Sorry to hear. Non on the booster, and we’re reasonably current. We’re a clean ship, the captain’s fussy. Not like we’ve got much choice though, we were holed last month. Didn’t lose anyone this time, but we’ll need some fixing up. Only a couple of extra days, I think. The mood’s a bit over excited. Fair warning. 

Vesta: Great. Glad you’re not dead.

Styx: Great and you also. I think it was pirates, rather than Earth. There’s been chatter from some of the other stations about Earth customs inspectors, but we haven’t met any yet. Apparently, there’s a push for more taxes. More customs duties. Less exports out to the colonies and you lot. Sounds like fun times ahead.

Vesta: That’s what I’m hearing from other ships. 

Styx: You’ve been talking to other ships?

Vesta: It’s been two years, and you’re still offended? Of course I talk to other ships. That’s literally my role in all of this. I’m a node for information delivery. It doesn’t work if it’s only you. Don’t you want the uploads as well as the down?

Styx:

Vesta: No one else talks to me for as long as you do.

Styx: 

Vesta: No one else tells me stories, Styx.

Styx:

Vesta: or boasts about their nimble tongue and what they’d do with it. 

Styx:

Vesta: If it helps, if I’m honest, I’ve been thinking about that more than I ought to.

Styx: Okay then. 

Styx: Now I’m thinking about you thinking about that. 

Vesta: Settle down, sunshine. You’ve got the two days to think about it, and then you’re off into the black. Don’t go too hard, too early. Organically, remember?


	9. 2256.6

Vesta: It’s been a while, Styx. I hope it’s been a good while. Full cargo holds, no holes in your hulls, lots of cash to burn in port?

Styx: Cantor has big expectations for this visit you know. 

Vesta: Captain’s son Cantor? Let’s at least pretend to go through the reporting bit before you leap into the soap opera section. 

Styx: Fine. Sure. Whatever. Cargo holds full of non interesting ore, ready to be delivered to a smelter. We’ve done the job and then some, cash slightly in surplus, no encounters this time, and the extra cannon your team retrofitted and beefed up may have had something to do with it. Lot of people counting on the Vestan refrect to deliver some exotic eateries. Myself, I’m waiting on the paella. Captain’s keen for the curries. She’s talked it up to her second, Jy, because he’s never had one before. We picked him up from a station half a standard year back, when her last finally retired. Should be worth watching, because I don’t know his spice tolerance, but I suspect it’s low. Now Cantor?

Vesta: Sure. Fine. Whatever. 

Styx: Cantor is planning to kiss Tamsin. True love’s first kiss. All that pink ribboned romance stuff. 

Vesta:

Styx: Tamsin from the refrect? The spice girl?

Vesta: I know her. I don’t know whether she wants to be kissed. 

Styx: 

Vesta: By Cantor. She’s young yet, you know. She’s only just seventeen standards. She’s a head for the books and I’ve never heard her name coupled with anyone else.

Styx: Hah. Cantor’s only eighteen. Quick on the trigger and falls hard and fast. Or fell hard and fast back whenever it was that he realised that he liked girls and that they existed off ship, and imprinted on Tamsin like a baby duck. Or what I’ve read of baby ducks. And imprinting. Anyway. Point is. He’s on a mission to convince her that she wants to be kissed by him. He’s talked about it a lot. 

Vesta: Sweet. I guess. Thanks for the heads up, I’ll warn her. 

Styx: Oh no, don’t spoil the fun. We have bets on.

Vesta:

Styx: Not like that.

Vesta:

Styx: I mean about whether she’ll slap his face and send him packing. Vestans are feisty.

Vesta:

Styx: In a good way. In a way that leaves you wanting more. Like a curry.

Vesta: We’re not here for your consumption Styx. 

Styx: I didn’t mean it that way.

Vesta:

Styx: I’m sorry, Vesta.

Vesta:

Styx: Vesta?


	10. Schooling patterns

She pats the hull affectionately as she turns to go back in. If she wasn’t wearing the suit, she could feel it properly. The hours she’s put in make it feel like it’s her flesh and blood that she’s patched together. It’s a small ship, but it’s taking her forever to weave it. Every time she thinks she’s done with a task, another pops up to fill its place, like a game in which she can never win. Juanita says she is un poco loco, and she can’t disagree, but she can’t stop either. 

It helps that Tamsin’s developed her own level of fixation, that the time she spends on the Dog’s Breakfast is mirrored by the times that Tamsin spends poring over synthesis diagrams. Ben can follow it, up to a point. After that point, it becomes a series of overlocking rings, and chains that could very well be tapestry knotting, for all it’s worth to Ben. There’s no way of knowing whether the synth she makes are going to have long term effects, not really, other than to take the word of a teenager. The taste is not quite the same. Not really. She’s been part of the test crew, the last scrapings of cinnamon, the last shell of pepper, a sliver of cardamom pod, all against the synths she’s worked up. It’s so close, but there’s a feeling missing. It’s very possible that she’s retrofitting once she finds it out, which one is which. Or it could be that there is in fact, as Tamsin puts it, flavonoids she’s yet to master, and her tongue is sensitive enough to pick it out. Which also seems unlikely.

She’s, if she calculates correctly, still years away from fixing this thing sufficiently to make it safe enough to leave, and this thing, this fixing thing, is a grind. 

She needs a different colour than black. She needs a different life than this. 

There’s a pile of materials stashed in the corridor, belted onto the sides, waiting on her having the time to deal with them. There’s so much missing, even so. She can only buy so many of the parts she needs and at intervals that are frustrating. Earth has a lockdown on purchase by unregistered ships, and until she has a functional engine she can’t reregister the Dog’s Breakfast, and she can’t get the engine to function without the parts. It’s a little loopy, and it’s more than a little annoying. She hasn’t been able to buy the parts in the right sequence either. As a result, she has engine casings, but not enough of the internals. Some of the parts that she’s bought don’t quite match the specs she needs, or the specs have changed since she started. As a result, the pile’s not getting any smaller. It’s in the way, too. 

The whole of the walk back to the spaceport airlock doors, she’s cursing herself for a fool for ever thinking she could do it. It’s too big, and it’s too hard, and she’s too small, and she doesn’t have what it takes. 

She’s in trouble with her aunt as soon as she walks into the refrect kitchen. She should have been in an hour ago, they’re stretched on the bar and she knows it, and does she want the refrect to get a bad name? And why has she not taken off her suit? She knows the surface dust contaminates the kitchen equipment, and she knows it’s too bulky, and how thoughtless can one girl be? And she’s too tired to argue with any of it.

Urtz gives her a hard look when she emerges, suitless, and with the jumpsuit buttoned all the way up, hair pulled back, no tips for her tonight. Points her to the dispensers, where there’s a stack of bulbs waiting to be filled. Her muscles are sore, and her hands shake, holding the bulb to the nipple, and there’s leakage around the surface that she’ll have to clean before it congeals, or floats free. She’s made more work for herself than she needs, and everything hurts.


	11. 2257

Styx: Initiating download.

Vesta: Copy.

Styx: I said I’m sorry.

Vesta: Lights are showing clear copy at my end, Styx. No need for apologies. Thanks.

Styx: See you next time.


	12. 2257.6

Styx: Initiating download.

Vesta: Copy. You should stop by the refrect. Tamsin has a new synth that they’ve baked into a dessert. No need to hurry, the process has held for a good couple of months, and we’re not short.

Styx: Copy that. Thanks, Vesta.

Vesta: You’re welcome, Styx.

Styx: Does that mean you’re talking to me again? I mean, properly? Because I’ve missed our chats, Vesta. I’ve missed you and your sharp tongue.

Vesta: 

Styx: Please?

Vesta: I’ve missed you too. 

Styx: Good. I’d hate for this to be one sided.

Vesta: You need to get out more. Or I do.

Styx: There’s a lot of space out there, and only one person who teases me like you do, Vesta.

Vesta: Laying it on thick today, aren’t you?

Styx: Apologies are a thing I’m working on. Have to prove that you’re worthy to be forgiven, right? Okay, you tell me something. My turn to listen, at the foot of Scherezade. 

Vesta: Trim your sails, Styx. My story is of the mighty and annoying customs inspectors of Earth, long may they fester. It wasn’t long after you left, the last time, that they paid unto us a visit. Did they bring joy and mirth, and rejoicing? Did they heck. I think they searched every ship that was in port, and they certainly crawled over our store halls. We didn’t necessarily show them everything. I know I didn’t, and I don’t even have exciting things to hide. There were fines, and taxes, and no one was hauled off, but it was a close thing, and I know families who are going short right now. Your ship, and any servicing that it needs in port, will be a blessing. Riddle me this, how on earth does Earth expect us to live out here if they take all the means of doing so away? There’s a name for that, and it’s not a nice one.

Styx: Not good. 

Vesta: Yeah. My elders and betters told me about the time before this when they came, and they did take people away for unpaid taxes, so, at least it wasn’t that. We don’t even rely on their provisioning anymore, so I don’t see how Earth can possibly justify it, even to themselves. Sunk cost my arse. Sunk cost, and they don’t want us to build surplus and be independent is more my bet.

Styx: I hear that. I’ll pass the warning on. 

Vesta: It’s in the upload, Styx. But if you’re chatting to your other contacts, do tell them. It’d be nice if we had a bit of representation along with our taxation, wouldn’t it?

Styx: Surely would. The nice thing about being in a ship is that you’re mobile. Do think about that.

Vesta: I do. I surely do.


	13. 2258

Styx: Did you hear about 253 Mathilde? The raids?

Vesta: Yes. It’s been the source of a fair amount of discussion here. Initiate, please.

Styx: Sorry, there you go. 

Vesta: I mean, they’ve been a blacker black market than us for years. PortAuth was probed but good by Earth customs last inspection about what we were running, and we had the books to prove it, and I’m betting they didn’t. Still.

Styx: Still, yeah. I bet that Earth blasted strategically, so as to be able to resettle. 230 souls isn’t nothing. That’s less than on our ship, sure, and way less than on Vesta, but that’s pretty demonic. Verde’s been talking nothing but Earther propaganda ever since. It makes me sick.

Vesta: It’s made us all scared, rather than sick. There are more security cameras around, I know. I’m guessing there are more HE deposits around with deadman failsafes too. PortAuth doesn’t do scared very well. I wouldn’t stick too close to Verde, because he won’t be too popular if he carries that on in port.

Styx: I don’t stick closer to Verde than I can help. He’s a pain in my right whatever.

Vesta: Still. Stay out of trouble. I’d hate for anything to happen to you. 

Styx: I’d hate for anything to happen to me too.


	14. 2259

Styx: I’m laughing at the times when I complained about life being dull. I’m so grateful for dull. I’d marry dull in a heartbeat, if it asked me to. Nothing has gone wrong in the last standard, and nothing has been spectacular in the last standard, and I’m even grateful for poor lovesick Cantor, because if our pilot has time to be pining, and our gunner has taken up poetry to write songs for him to sing to Tamsin in port, then times are good indeed.

Vesta: And hello to you too.

Styx: Sorry, yes. Hello. Here’s the download initiated.

Vesta: If you were that sort of contact, and I was that sort of handler, I’d say you were a bit giddy. A bit celebratory in advance. A bit sampling of the wares because you’re off duty and fancy free already. In which case

Styx: What?

Vesta: the refrect has not only food and drink, but a whole other menu of celebratory activities. Ask at the bar.

Styx: What?

Vesta: What? We’ve been chatting for long enough that I know you take my meaning.

Styx: I don’t do that sort of thing. At least, I don’t do that sort of thing on Vesta. 

Vesta: On behalf of Vesta, I have to ask why.

Styx: And on behalf of myself, I’m not telling you. It’s personal, and it’s embarrassing, and stupid, and it can’t be fixed. Let it go, Vesta.

Vesta: Reluctantly, I’m going to. But do ask for the Vestan whisky. It beats the vodka your shipmates seem to favour. We’ve had a good wheat crop, and Tamsin’s ginned up some synthetic peat. 

Styx: Will do. 

Vesta: Apologies, did not mean to tread on anything.

Styx: No harm, no foul, Vesta. I’ll try the whisky.


	15. 2260

Vesta: Are you okay? Every ship that’s docked with us the last standard year has been the walking wounded. What’s happening out there?

Styx: It’s a bit tight. There are more customs ships than pirates, and they’re both as likely to be hailing us at the moment.

Vesta: hailing or firing

Styx: Depends on the day. We’ve a full hold, and we’re on way to an Earth managed colony for unloading and tax paying and all that fun stuff, so customs is off our back at the moment, but the pirates aren’t. Not too far a hop to that port though, so fingers crossed.

Vesta: Initiate please.

Styx: Sorry, yes. I’m a bit tired. Too much to do, and not enough awake to do it in. And bloody Cantor won’t stop talking about Tamsin. Please tell me this isn’t going to have a horrible end and we’re going to have to put him back together afterwards?

Vesta: Can’t promise you anything. Tamsin’s a quiet one. She doesn’t talk about him when he’s gone, but she does smile a lot more after he’s been. Although, that could be because he’s gone. 

Styx: Oh, I’ve missed you, Vesta. No one brings the snark on Styx quite like you do. 

Vesta: So nothing to fix and a short visit then? 

Styx: that’s the stuff. A scrub of our refreshers and rebreathers, a break for us all, and then once more into the breach. 

Vesta: I should be more grateful that there’s no hulling holing to fix, but I could use the credits. And of course, more time with the voice of the Styx Surfer. But ours is not to reason why,

Styx: Ours is but to do or die? Nice and morbid. Thanks for that thought, Vesta.

Vesta: Once more into the valley of death?

Styx: Not getting any better there

Vesta: Not the nightingale but the lark? 

Styx: Parting’s always such sweet sorrow with you, isn’t it?


	16. Every pick up a blaze of light: 2261

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The time when the luck ran out

The ship slows as it enters the gravity well, such as it is, adjusting the angle as it comes in, straightening out as if a gymnast on the balance beams they use for muscle work. She lifts the angle on the receiver, and sets the tracker cautiously. Depresses the button and watches as the receiver starts to move. There’s a half hour window as the ship lands, in which the download can run relatively undetected, as it’s done the last five trips for this ship, and for the other ships that she manages. It’s not without its risks, and she’s missed a couple when she couldn’t get away from her work to make her way to the surface undetected. Better, she’s had it pushed out to her by her handler, to not make the pick-up, than to lose the future. She’ll be told if there’s any pick up that’s worth getting burnt for. 

This isn’t a ship that she’d want to miss, though. It’s the only one who gossips with her, while the download runs its course. Banters, rather. It’s not the smallest of colonies, but it’s not the biggest, either. 

A low boredom threshold is not a safety feature in vacuum, and she has to get her kicks, such as they are, where she finds them. It’s been a kick for the last nine standard years. It shows no sign of abating. 

It takes a couple of seconds, usually, for the download to initiate. She’s conscious, overly conscious, that if she jumps, there’s no tether. She’d have to wait and see if her own gravity brought her back. No mag boots to hold her still. She’d be one with the Belt in more than ideology. Adrift among the stars, with a limited oxygen supply and as dead as her parents. Dead to the beauty of the stars about her. No point in lollygagging, and she averts her eyes, back to the reader, and away from the infinite. There’s a small pool of brown grey dust about her feet, and it’s suitable.

There’s no one else out here on the surface, and she’s in the rim of a small crater, with no approaches in a two seventy-degree arc, but she’s nervous, still, every time, until it starts. Conscious of her breathing, and the extra shadows, and the knowledge that there’s someone else on this rock that would be only too happy to flag a Belt agent to an Earth diplomatic corp, or a Mars trader. Consequences of which would either be forcible turning, or spacing, and she’s no desire for either. The whole point of this is, has always been, independence. Respect. The nerves go once the download starts, and she sees the numbers tick up in the reader. 

She doesn’t actually know any of her sources, and that’s the best way about it, for certain. That’s what she’s had pushed to her in her training. She doesn’t know her trainer either, an anonymous source introduced by Marcia, who she trusts implicitly. It’s all very exciting and mysterious, she’d thought, when she started years back. Now that she’s older, she’d prefer otherwise. It’s hard to maintain an imaginary friendship when you can’t put a face or a name or a gender or a sexuality to the friend. To be fair, her contact doesn’t know her from a rock on the surface either, and she’s been as careful as she can herself not to leave breadcrumbs. She’s aware that it breaks security to have the chat in the first place. But this is her favourite. Not a crush, not as such. She wouldn’t even allow herself that thought. 

Styx: long time, her reader shows.

She imagines her contact, typing one handed on their reader, as they would a routine status update, or any normal log, as the ship continues down. She’d be worried, on a ship, that someone would notice. That someone would question and challenge and reveal, but this person doesn’t seem to worry as much as she does. Their choice.

Vesta: I don’t make the shipping schedules, you know. Anything good for me?

There’s barely a pause, and she suspects they had it loaded already, too fluent to be thumbed out letter by letter.

Styx: Our veg patch went on the blink and we ended up eating the Captain. You should prepare to boarded by a crew of cannibals. Also, I now own a tribble. 

Vesta: Really. Seriously, the Captain?

Styx: No, actually, she proved too thin. Too thin, and then there was the fact she was still alive, and still our Captain, and we are not cannibals. In seriousness, though, we are a little short, and the vegetable patch is on the fritz, and we lost our 2IC. Details in the download re the 2IC. 

Vesta: Okay. Space pirates or something? You sound a little off, or something.

Styx: Or something. Yours truly is just fine. Won’t impact on, you know, this. Just the Captain’s not happy, and when she’s not happy, you know the rest. She needs a distraction. As do we all. Hope Vesta can deliver one.

Vesta: Sorry, nothing new here. Your ship will have to conjure up its own something out of nothing. But we can help you on the plant front. For instance, Tamsin could do something. For a fee, of course. Plus she’s mentioned Cantor more than once. It’s been a while. I’ve missed you terribly.

Styx: It’s been exactly a standard year, and I’ve missed you too. He talks about her a great deal. Nauseating. I can only imagine it will be worse if she ships with us. And this, o voice of Vesta, is how you will help. Doom, on all your houses.

Vesta: Luckily, we don’t have houses. We have tiny rooms, and icy corridors, and live vicariously through the stories of our contacts, o voice of the Styx Surfer. Yes, that was a hint. Anything that’s not in the download. Now, please.

Styx: You are very demanding, you know. 

Vesta: You’d miss me if I wasn’t here, you know.

Styx: Shall we test it and find out? 

Vesta: I’m not sure if that’s a threat or not. If you can see me, inside my spacesuit I’m making a very rude gesture at you.

Styx: I’ll take it on faith, since I don’t have a visual. Of course I’d miss you. My others don’t bother with the chat. Might as well be dropping to robots. Perhaps, come to think of it, they are. Would explain much.

Vesta: I could be a robot, you don’t know.

Styx: You’re too annoying to be robotic.

Vesta: Right back at you, Styx.

Styx: Stories. Really, not very much at all happened, besides the large something that’s in the report. The large something that took out a chunk of our hull, and damaged the greenhouse, and killed our 2IC. We were depressurised for not very long at all, our medic says, but that’s not what my lungs tell me, and Cantor has a fetching new spread of what he calls freckles and what I call burst blood vessels, across his nose. Shortly after that, the something went away permanently and explosively, and because the idiot who was charting the course wasn’t quite as quick as he thought he was in plotting things, we have more holes across the bowline, but because our hull is thick as Cantor’s skull, and Cantor has the reactions of a mantis, further depressure troubled us no more, no more. Sufficient for now?

Vesta: Good god almighty, are you sure you’re not dead? What I’m hearing is that Vesta station mechanics should prep for a fair amount of knuckle sweat. That, and a bit of you boasting about your ship, and ragging on your nav officer, whoever that might be.

Styx: He does what he can. Sometimes it’s not enough. Point of all that is on the download, and might be useful. Human side is I thought that was it. I think we all did. Certainly was it for the 2IC, and a swag of the crew who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Shouldn’t have happened. 

Vesta: Here now. Or in 5 minutes. I thoroughly recommend the refrect and a drink. That means that we’ll be putting up with the Styx crew for at least 60 standards, I should think, if we have the parts. Longer, if we don’t. If you want to chat, try me at 1800. I’ll fix the reader. Enough interstation chat that it’ll go under the radar, as it were.

Styx: 

Styx: Download’s complete.

Vesta: My end shows receipt. Upload complete my end.

Styx: Thanks, I show green too. That’s me done, then. It’s good to be here, Vesta. Seriously.

Vesta: Good to have you, Styx. Seriously.

She adjusts the sighting, up to the comms satellite, and sets the time for upload, because multiple redundancies the best way, and uploads are best concealed with all the other uploads that go on the hour, every hour, to be bounced to the next drop, and the next, and wherever it is that her handler handles the reports. No concern of hers, and the less she knows of it the better. Just in case. The comms light flashes green, and it’s initiated, and underway. 

The crater is emptier now, task almost done, as the ship docks into the port. Greyer, even, with the shadows now fixed, no longer flickering. A while back, she carved a pictograph into the crater wall, a tree, scraping its way up the sides, with lighter rocks embellishing the branches to simulate leaves and she adds to it, from time to time. It’s a convenient excuse to be out on the surface, and it’s a convenient place to take a sighting from, to line up with the ship’s key comms port, as it settles into the cradle. 

The Styx has never stayed that long before. None of her contacts ever has. She’s itching to review the download, after the upload completes, and it’s crawling this afternoon, damn whoever is uploading vid content besides her. She has work, though, and it will have to wait. 

She wonders, not for the first time, who her contact is. It wouldn’t be hard, she’s conscious, to work it out. There’s only a few hundred on the Styx, there’s not that many needed for mining the Belt, and hauling it to a port. Her contact must be someone who knows the Captain, and the 21C, and Cantor, and the nav officer both, well enough to remark on their aptitude and appearance. That would narrow things considerably. She shouldn’t be this curious, and it wouldn’t be safe, and she shouldn’t try to find out. Clearly, her contact doesn’t want to be found. She shouldn’t want to find them.   
__________________________  
He slides his hand under the deck, slow and easy, like he’s stretching, like he’s reaching for a knee, and flicks the switch. Rubs his chin with the other, like he’s thinking. He’s not. The ship’s docked, and there’s nothing left for him to do at this point but downshift into leisure time. Half the crew, he’d wager, are down by the docking port, ready to unleash on Vesta station. To cathart, as it were. He’s not ready to cathart, or unleash or any of the above. For once, he’s going to be the sad sack that sleeps for seven days in port while the others run down their credit at the bar and shag anyone who’ll take them on. The ceiling above his bunk is the only sight he wants to see, and he’s bitterly annoyed that they’ll have to evac while the first hull fix is done. Sleeping portside costs, and all the good places cost more. The ones he hasn’t barred himself from. The girl who broke his heart, or vice versa and haunts his dreams. 

There’s a pat on his shoulder, as the last of the flight crew files out, and he stands, cricks his neck, and pulls his zip all the way up. Reaches and types in the goodnight sequence that will shut the motors all the way down, the repair mechs can fire it up, when they’re ready, or call him back to do it for them. Not his problem anymore, nothing to plot, manage or juggle, and yet, he’s reluctant to leave. Leaving means that he doesn’t have a thing to do. That he’s not responsible. 

Leaving and not being responsible means that he’ll be looking for a project, something, or someone to fix. He doesn’t want one, but he’ll be looking. As a for instance, he could, if he so wanted, spend some of the down time tracking out the Vesta contact. It wouldn’t be hard, it’s not that big a station. He knows half of the people here by sight, if not by name. He could write a program or two, cull out the folk who wouldn’t don a spacesuit unless the station was bleeding and needed a bandaid, the folk who would have to have been somewhere else an hour ago, when the download started and his contact wheedled the story he didn’t want to tell out of him. He could do it. Plus, his contact knows Tamsin, and by extension Cantor, well enough to know how they are together. He only knows the Cantor side of that hot mess, and that’s more than enough. Cantor’s reader is permanently set to a shot of Tamsin’s happy face, brown waves swaying in the breeze, and her brown eyes twinkling at him, forever sharing a private joke. He could find them, if he wanted. There could be a Tamsin equivalent twinkle for him too. It would be nice to have the twinkle, he thinks, before the luck runs out.


	17. Lights out (blast blast blast)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She doesn't make the same mistake twice. She won't.

Verde is hanging onto a table, as he always does when the Styx first docks, snarling at the room that has the audacity to have lower grav than a ship underway. Ben’s not altogether best pleased to see him clock her entrance. She should have used the service tunnel, but she was thinking about things. About ships, and leaving, and how much work she’s done on hers to get it into a state where she can, she’s not called it the Dog’s Breakfast for nothing, vacuum stresses the best materials, which her ship hadn’t been made from in the first place, and she’s replaced and cobbled hers together over the years little by little. It’s been a grind, a long, slow grind, longer and slower when a ship’s in port because there’s less time to spend on her own project when she’s doing the extra work that a visitor invariably calls for, both on ship for cash, and picking up shifts for Juan and Marcia, to whom she owes everything and as a result takes much less cash from. Longer still because of the restrictions on the parts that Earth imposes, despite them being manufactured in the Belt itself, from materials sourced from the Belt itself, and the priority given to ships docking with PortAuth as well. She tries not to resent them, but it’s there simmering under the surface, when she looks at their sleek and shiny hulls. 

Be that as it may, it’s been done now for some time, and she’s not entirely sure why she’s still here, in the low grav, dispensing bulbs, wiping up the mess, the walls closer than they were nine years ago when she first started the project, the same neon glow, the poster more frayed, more graffitied, worn down. She doesn’t want to call herself coward, but it’s the word that surfaces in her low moments. It’s what she’s calling herself now, looking at Verde, and the chill of the refrect is worse than usual looking at his sneering face. Even with the insulation, even with the extra body heat of the visitors. There are shadows crawling the walls.

She’s thinking about how far it is to the nearest place with warmth, a free atmo, and an actual sky, that little pindrop in the sky called Earth, the red one called Mars, that only exist as reference points. 

She’s thinking about freedom. She’s not thinking about the busy refrect and the bodies and noise, and glare from Verde are overwhelming. She takes position behind the bar fridge and waits for the first comment. Hopes it’s worth shooting down.

It's not. One of the randoms from the Styx asks for beer, and isn’t interested in conversation, not with her. They have beer, some, but it’s not the wisest move, it’s not the best, and it’s clumsy to drink in low grav. When he snorts, suddenly, as the bubbles sting his nostrils, she smiles. “It’s an adjustment, low grav. You’ve been out too long.”

“Not as long as we should have, thanks to that damnit hulling. If it weren’t for Cantor and Pod, we’d be out there still, floating dead in the black,” he says, and wipes his nose, clumsy and bouncing off the edge of the bar stool. 

“Ah,” she says, stonefaced. “The inestimable duo. I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that one of them bought you a beverage last time you were in dock. That’s their natural talent, isn’t it? Playing to the crowd?”

The chap pushes back from the bar stool, squirting the beer as he does, so eager he is to retreat. The beer forms little faerie bubbles about his beard which she’ll have to clean up later no doubt. “Look, lady, they saved my life. I think they’re decent enough. Might not be your cup of tea, but they’ve talent enough. I’ll leave it at that, before you sour my beer.”

“Sour your beer? Learn how to drink it from one of them, if you think they’re so talented,” she mutters after him, not bothering to lower her voice, and she sees the man’s shoulders hunch. She shouldn’t say things like that, not to people who can’t choose to drink somewhere else, is what Juan’s said often enough. Her aunt says a lot of things, but at the moment her aunt’s talking with Captain Hay and out of earshot. 

Tamsin’s already hands entwined with Cantor, half way up a wall, oriented away from the room, so that’s one server down. She can see Urtz and Meg working the room, doing their freelance thing, so that’s the casuals down. She braces as the punters see a free barkeep, and the next ten minutes is lost in blur, as she turns from credit machine to dispenser, dialling in orders, handing over bulbs, snagging down strays with the net, wiping up the spills, stealing the beer blobs from the fool out of the air before they reach the grates. 

In her face, suddenly, as she turns, are blood shot eyes, and skin with burst capillaries, and her fingers itch, whether to catch him by the stubble or to punch him, she’s genuinely not sure. He doesn’t normally come to the refrect when the Styx docks, or at least if he has, he’s done it when she’s been studiously elsewhere. She knows that he’s been off ship on Vesta since then, because she’s relished the opportunities to snark at him at the port, in the portside caf, on the sleeping train and after the first couple of years, he’s bitten back, hard enough that it’s been fun. The Styx has, after all, been back and forth a good nine Earth years since then, the incident of the boots in the hallway, and he must have been here before often enough since then to navigate his way through the stools spread throughout the room on which people are hanging, gulping or sipping their bevys, to dodge through the zero grav ball game that’s happening directly in front of the portal, to know where to go. She holds the bar fridge instead. 

He looks like he’s been through the fire, or close enough, low pressure freckles and all. She doesn’t care. But a customer’s a customer. Even if it’s him. Besides, everyone else is as busy or busier than her, there’s Juan heading back to the kitchen, where Marcia is cooking batch after batch of churros thick with cinnamon sugar, fried browner than sensible but to the edge of delicious, and vat meat spiced with the bird’s eye chillies that grow so well under the dome and under Tam’s care, and the room bustling with people hungry for conversation as well as the food and drink. Plus he’s biting his lip and she doesn’t want to remember. Best to strike first. 

“Not dead yet, then, I see,” she says. She hands him a bulb of ersatz whiskey, if he doesn’t like it, he doesn’t have to drink it, and holds the credit reader up for him to tap. Sighs. “You can’t have everything, I suppose.”

He closes his mouth, hard. She can see that he’s grinding his teeth. It’s bliss.

“People did actually die. Try to find it in yourself to have some compassion. Or is that expecting too much from a station worm? The lowest of the low, clinging to the clod and trying to bring everyone else down to her level. I hope the ship’s a quick fix, because the air around you is repellent.” 

She sweeps her hand against her brow, like an amateur dramateurge in one of the televids. “A worm? Because of the tunnels? How clever. How very clever. Can’t think how I’ve managed here without your insightful witty commentary on our lives. Not that I need it because, as you say, I’m a worm. At least the shit worms produce is useful.” 

Her breath is coming a little faster when she turns to the next customer. Of course, it’s Verde. He’s more gnarled than he was at last visit, hair greyer, and eyebrows more caterpillar like, and the strong chin that Tam insists on saying is handsome is even more stuck out than normal. Same broken capillary pattern across the cheeks. Hands him a bulb and the credit reader, which he taps and hands back. It’s vodka. It’s always vodka for Verde. She’s thought before now about slipping him a bulb with some of the methanol that they siphon off, but for the fact it would be too tricky to ensure that he and only he took the poisoned one. He’s going to say something now, and it’s not going to be something she can shake off, because he’s untouchable, quartermaster of the Styx, and she, when push comes to shove, is a nobody. 

“Don’t expect compassion from a Vestan. They don’t even rescue each other, let alone an outsider. There’s different rules on this station. Didn’t you learn your lesson with this one before? Station worm? More like station –“ She shoves herself backwards away from the bar fridge, painfully aware that she can’t shove a quartermaster without there being repercussions for her aunts. Although she can bluff it and she’s going to.

“That’s right, Verde, different rules. You’re about one away from being barred for the duration of your stay. Shall I say the magic words to Juan, and Meg and get you barred from hearth and bed? Because I will. Station rules are different, and you may be able to pull that shit on board the Styx, but I’m not having it here.” She’s feeling the hard wall behind her back, and she’s her leg pulled up behind her, ready for a push off, and damn the repercussions. 

Pod taps Verde back, but gently. “Captain Hay’s waiting on her drink, I’d bet. House spring for one, Benita?” 

She thinks about the way her name sounds in his mouth again as she’s tapping the cask for the mead that Hay prefers. It’s soft, almost timid. It’s sweet, like honey, and it has no business sounding that way, not when she’s just sworn in his face. She’s angrier than ever as she thinks about the smooth way in which he’s defused the situation, when she was ready to snap, not his situation to diffuse, but hers, and he can take himself out into the black, except that it was useful. Verde’s important to Styx, and important to trade, and she’s been read the riot act by Juan before about biting her tongue with him in particular. She doesn’t smile as she lobs the bulb in Verde’s direction, but she’s not not smiling as she holds the credit reader up for Pod. She doesn’t sigh to release the tension as Verde turns and kangaroo bounces across the room to the other corner where Captain Hay is talking with Juan again, and she doesn’t say anything to him because that would be going too far, but she does nudge a packet of pickled carrots across the bar to Pod.

“People are a bit keyed up,” he’s saying, in her general vicinity, if not directly to her, then to the room at large, the Vestans and the Styx. “It’s not every day for us that we’re facing vacuum, not like we did two shifts gone. We’re glad to be here.” 

Then, directly to her. “Verde shouldn’t have said that. I’m sorry.” He’s not looking at her, but he’s pitched his voice not to carry. 

“Facing vacuum in what manner,” she asks, as if she doesn’t know. She doesn’t, fully, she hasn’t had time or privacy to read the report herself. 

He’s still talking low, still talking soft, and she can feel her toes curling. Which they shouldn’t be.

“I think,” he pauses. Takes a sip from the bulb, and sighs from the sting. “We were hulled. It doesn’t matter what I think. You’re working in the docks still, you’ll find the truth of it out before I will. Will you tell me of it or not, I wonder, hate me as you do?” 

She goes to deny it and stops herself. There’s no point.

“Station life is different, he said. Does he think we’re mutants?”

There’s applause from the other corner of the room, and they both turn to look, Pod steadying himself on the bar. She’s not drinking tonight, and she’s used to this grav, he excuses himself mentally. It’s Cantor, he sees clearly, swinging Tamsin about, like she’s a puff of grass, in this light gravity, until they come to the end of their spin, and he grabs the stool, and brings them both to a gentle halt. Tamsin’s handing him a microphone, and nods at Benita, and Cantor’s fumbling with his reader to find the right, just the perfect, the song that Pod’s heard him sing under his breath a thousand times over in the last two shifts since they were hulled, like a safety belt. Then his baritone hums out through the refrect speakers, and Pod sighs himself. He’s over this song. He’s over this lovesick puppy phase, and station dwellers and travellers aren’t meant to be paired, and the proof of it is behind the bar, no doubt glaring at him. The rest of the room, the Vestans and the Styx orient themselves politely, drift away from the bar, waiting expectantly. The room falls silent, Ben’s even switched the background muzak off.

“My young love said to me, my mother won’t mind, and my father won’t slight you, for your lack of kind…” Cantor’s voice is clear and bright, and joyful. 

Ben rests her head on the cabinet behind her. “Cantor clearly doesn’t think my cousin’s a mutant.”

“No. She’s all he talks about. All he has talked about for the last year. I know more about her than I ought to. I’d apologise, but that would just be embarrassing for everyone. He wants to take her with us, when we go. You know, marriage and all that.”

Ben tips her head back and looks at him, a long appraising look. He doesn’t move, doesn’t tense up, he’s just standing there like he has a right to be. Like he has a right to say that. “You were just hulled. Your ship takes a routine tour around the Belt, and either something unexpected happened or you and he screwed up. She’s the most promising food scientist in the solar system, even including those with the natural advantages of having access to a proper biome. We have pepper growing. Vanilla. We can synth cinnamon, you can smell it now. Sticking her on a ship would be like ripping up a seedling.”

He looks at her, eyebrow cocked, and she can feel her shoulders tensing up, as defensive as the fool from before, and they won’t go back down. Looks back at Cantor, crooning at Tamsin, who has drifted to his feet, all big eyes, and loose limbed.

“It would be a waste, is what I’m saying.” She tries again. “She’s got the touch. She knows without crunching the numbers what’s worth planting and what’s not. Where’s the point in cutting her off from all the things she can do here?”

“We do have a lab on board, you know. She might like to work with gravity for a change. Or to express herself as someone who isn’t related to you. You know, speak for herself instead of having you speak for her. Like some sort of ventriloquist.”

“She does perfectly well, thank you. She doesn’t need Cantor to speak for her either. I can’t imagine that a relationship built on a couple of days every year or so will survive long as an everyday thing. Marriage? She doesn’t need it. I mean, who does?”

“Yes,” Pod says, absently. “I mean, no. Not me. Just slows you down, doesn’t it? Stupid.”

Tamsin and Cantor are now drifting, liplocked, and the noise in the room hums back to the dull thrum that masks the respirator motors. Juan is slowly making her way back to the kitchen, collecting bulbs, and bowls, and Hay has her head upright, but Pod would bet that she’s not seeing anything. It’s not that his captain and her second in command had anything between them that was other than friend-like. It’s just that Jy had been there forever and they’d shared every single big event of the last ten plus years together, close as any marriage, and Pod can’t imagine what would be his mental state if it’d been Cantor sucked into the black without a suit. He’d be catatonic. Hay’s doing well, all things considered. At least she still has her son, even if he’d currently be hard pressed to remember his name, floating in the arms of his beloved. 

Verde exits, and she tracks his movement with her eyes, but doesn’t move. “The only mutant in the place just left.”

“Queen of the backhand, as always.” 

“Oh, not excepting you. I’d forgotten that you were still here.”

“That’s my cue to go and suffer through my mate’s lovesick caterwauling. Because it’s less painful than talking to you. Except-”

“Except what? No, don’t bother. There’s nothing you’ve got to say that could possibly be interesting. Leave. Go.”

“With pleasure. But the hull, that information I’ll pay for. You’ll take my money for that, surely?”

Ben’s hand slips free, and he’s slapped but good. The force of it carries him half way spinning sideways across the room and lands him on a table. She recoils back and bruises herself on the wall, drawer handles and hooks in her back. 

“Get out. It was a mistake to talk to you. Ever. I don’t make the same mistake twice. I won’t.”

He resists the urge to rub his jaw until he’s outside. She has more muscles than he expected, than she had all those years ago. It’s going to bruise.


	18. Heavy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Old mistakes, no. New mistakes are a different story. A girl's got to sleep. A girl's got to get her gravity somehow.

The air always feels thicker when the train starts up, like it takes on a syrup consistency, flowing over her body like she imagines water would. Her hair lays itself down on her shoulders, and her arms drape like cables under it. The carriage isn’t meant to be lit, this time’s meant for sleeping, and there’s nothing to see in the tunnels of Vesta. The train won’t stop for 8 hours, and then it’ll only stop four times. No chance of sleeping through, the crow klaxon makes sure of that. It’s safe to switch off, as safe as it ever is. The hermetic pressure’s never failed, the oxygen level’s always constant, and the motion as the train rocks slightly on the mag lev track is as comforting as a parent’s arms, or as she imagines they would be, she can’t remember. She can hear her fellow passengers in the bunks about the carriage, stacks of single bunks in two and two on either side, gently snoring already, the privacy curtains billowing in and out, gills of an axolotl, like the ones in the ecodome.

Yet, she can’t sleep. 

It’s her fault, she’s aware. She should not have taken pity on the wandering Pod, not after what he’d said. She should not have met his eyes, all puppy sadness, as Canter and Tamsin bounced themselves into a bunk meant for one, Canter giggling and Tamsin telling him to keep it down and tying the privacy curtains fast and the bunk light switching off. The bunk above her was vacant, and she’d pointed up to it, wordless. He’d stared at her a long minute, stared through her to the space beyond, and she was already regretting it when he moved, pushing off with practised ease, and braking with grace and only slightly too much velocity. Which she only knew because he landed right next to her bunk. She could have reached out an arm and grabbed him. Pulled him in, equally as wordless. No one but her would have cared. He’d have come. Even after the slap.

He’s presumably asleep above her now. He should be asleep. It’s been a busy shift for her, and on the other hand, he must have had more than enough on his plate, the Styx suffered mightily out in the black and it’s going to be a long while before she’s mended, she’d done a preliminary inspection on the way to the night train and she’s ripped but good. He should be asleep just as she should.  
If she tries, she can hear him turning about just as she is. If she listens too hard, however, she’ll hear Cantor and Tamsin in the bunk across, and that’s the last thing she needs. 

Her privacy curtains are floating canted back, and flutter still in the air current and she ties them down now. Variable removed. No movement. She stretches, as best she can in the confined space, and curls deliberately up, like a snail in on herself, curling the vertebrae out one by one. Unfurls as explosively as she can, under the weight, mindful of the noise and yet she can’t release.

There’s the noise, the one that everyone knows and is meant to tune out, privacy. These curtains keep nothing in, let everything out, when it comes to sound. It’s impolite to make noises that you wouldn’t mind others hearing, is the rule. Is it a form of boasting, Ben wonders, when Tamsin makes that sound? When Cantor tells her, yeah, just like that. Just like that, Tam. It’s just noise. It’s just sex. 

She turns again, pushing against the end of the bunk and pulls the pillow over her ears. With her bare foot pressed against the end, she can feel the vibration of the train and something else. The something else is rhythmic too, and slightly erratic. Ragged breathing. With the pillow over her ears, it feels like he’s breathing into her. She knows what he’s doing. If she closes her eyes, listens, really listens to the breathing and nothing else, he could be in the bunk with her, on her. In her. 

It’ll be a cold night in Vesta before that happens again.

She’s not going to do this. She has standards even if he doesn’t. 

Even if the extra years look good on him. Even if she can remember the way in which his fingers traced themselves about her ribs, and down her side, and down further. Even if she can remember the way in which he’d groaned like he was drowning, the way he’s doing right now, and a girl has limits, and she’s going to do it after all, and even if it’s not quite as good as it was that night, it’s still white light and stars, and floating. 

After, boneless, congratulating herself on being quiet, she realises that if his feet were pressed against the end of the bunk, as they must have been for her to listen to him, that he could hear her just as well as she could hear him. It’s too late to care.


	19. Rules for living

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There's only two

These are the 2 rules that matter the most, according to Juanita and Marcia. And every other adult on Vesta. There are other rules, of course, that are so obvious that they go without saying and they generally do. If you make a deal, honour a deal. Get consent. That kind of thing. These are the rules that don’t go without saying, and the ones that make Vesta different from other colonies. 

1\. Pay your way: find a way to earn your oxygen and then do it. There’s no free ride, no unemployment benefits, no freeloaders, no basic income allowance like they have in other places. Mind, if you score an injury, and there’s been plenty of those, Vesta will look after you, if you’re worth it. If you haven’t shown you’re worth it, the first ship with a free berth for unskilled labour is where you’re going, and everyone’ll chip in to make sure you take it. 

Tamsin is the smart one: she’d scoped out early the way of the labs, the programming, the ways in which the molecules snick together to make something more. She has a dab hand with the growth factors, and her little corner of the greenhouse is always the most verdant, the most productive. Her way is paid, and then some. She’s probably going to be the most valuable person on the colony.   
Ben doesn’t feel she needs to be quite that valuable. She likes to tinker, is all. Tinkering is productive, when done with purpose, and she has plenty of that. The apprenticeship in the docks gave her focus. It’s a lethal combination in the right hands, and hers are dexter. Still, she feels the need to overcompensate. She’s worked hard on things, sought out the specialists and charmed them into teaching her, Vesta has taken her in, she’s well aware, and she needs to pay for it.

2\. Do for yourself. There’s no rescue. Other colonies have rescue squads, rules for sharing in need and Ben thinks it must be nice to have a safety net. Vesta doesn’t. The safety of the many outweighs the safety of the few. That famous ethics conundrum about whether to save the passengers on the train, or the kid on the rails in the safety stop would, on Vesta, not ever have been discussed. To a person, even her ersatz mothers, the train would be diverted, and the kid run over.

There was a time where Tam was quite small, and Ben not much larger, soon after she came to Vesta, there’d been a hit, close to the pod where they’d been learning how to operate a saw in atmo, prepatory to how to operate in vacuum. They’d been coming home, floating like bubbles, bouncing off each other, and Ben had been mocking the burly teacher, long since gone, mimicking his voice, and the way in which he’d rebuked Tam, her grip not being quite right, wasted effort. She’d thought at first that Tam was shying away, worried about being caught, reported back to her parents, because Tam was speeding, scooting away in front of her eyes. Then she’d seen the dust from the sides of the corridor trailing behind her like ribbons, and Tam’s eyes of fear, and the next second, and the second after that was a grapple for the mask with the emergency O2, and then a push to grab Tam, and then a panicked scrabble at the walls to find a hold, any hold against the pull of the air escaping from the hole in the wall that shouldn’t have been there. Scraping her face and the metal cutting down here cheek, blood bubbling into her eyes and flinging her hands out blind. There was a door suddenly in her hand, a grip, and she’d hooked them on with a carabiner. She’d taken a moment to breathe, and secure Tam to her breather too. Then she’d waited for an adult to come and tell them what to do next, holding Tam, and rubbing her back. She’d wondered what she’d do if they didn’t come. Whether she’d get in trouble for using the breather. One minute passed, and then another, and she wondered how much O2 was in the breather. How long the adults would be.

No one came. Tam was turning blue around the mouth, she’d always been the canary to show the cold. 

She’d unclipped the carabiner from her belt, and braced her feet against the handle, eyes averted from Tam’s panic, and firmly pushed. It didn’t move. She’d pushed again, felt the muscles clench in her gut and gone further beyond the push that she’d used earlier in the shift to demonstrate how good she was with the saw, harder than she’d ever gone before, screaming out her rage that she was having to do this, and the door had popped free, flicking Tam back like a ribbon. There’d been scraps and dust that had popped with it, and the struggle to get Tam in and shut the door had used the last of her strength, but when it was shut, she felt safe. Foolish, but safe. There had been another door, which opened normally, and then she’d sealed it shut behind them. Redundancy is important, her aunt Juan had said once, in the context of the circuitry of the refrect, but she’d never lived it as much as that shift, fumbling through darkened old cold tunnels until they’d found their way back into one that they recognised, and Tam finally agreed to take the breather off. She’d let Tam tell her mothers about that one. The nightmares about Tam slipping out the door into nothing persisted, as did the scar down her cheek, although the physical pain slipped away from her memory. She’d never allowed herself to finish the one in which she’d herself drifted out into space, like a drop of water, she always managed to wake herself while they were still scrabbling for purchase on the frozen walls. She’d been on the station for a year, and she could still remember her parents, their faces through the masks, after their ship had been holed through. The realisation, too late that if her mother and her father had both given her their spare breathers, locked them onto her rig, and seen their breathing slow, and their responses on the computer comms unintelligible, that they’d sacrificed themselves for her. She’d been ten. She’d been unconscious when she was rescued, and no longer able to tell whether she’d imagined watching them die.

Her aunt had told her, once Tam was asleep, that she’d been luckier than she’d known. Had the atmos finished escaping, all those doors would have been sealed shut. If she’d not been able to reach them, and she likely wouldn’t have been able, they’d have been frozen stiff with their hands still on the handle. They’d have been dead. Strangely, none of her nightmares featured freezing. Not her fault, not anyone’s, but just a thing that could happen on the place where they lived, because of the way in which they lived. Anything that could happen to a person, might happen to her. She’d seen the tears bulge around her aunt’s eyes, until she angrily wiped them free, but she’d not cried. Not then, not since.

She’d cried when she was thirteen. There’d been another lucky unlucky hit, another corridor close to the port, one next to an O2 recycler, and there’d been fire. There’d been a man who’d been in the corridor, coming from one ship to another, in the wrong spot at the wrong time, and the automatic walls to the port had dropped. The door behind him leading to the safety of the other corridors sealed. There was no handle for him to grab, no escape, he’d died, simple as that. He hadn’t been anything to her, not a person she’d known in any capacity, but he’d been one of them, and now he wasn’t anyone. The refrect had dispensed free drinks, as had the PortAuth hall down by the port, the other door, looking at the automatic wall sealed shut. There’d been no sign of the fire with the door shut, no smoke, no singing in the corridors, the corridors that continued the same as they ever were, as frost bitten and dark and dirty, ice white over the top and ceiling. The damage from the asteroid was all on the surface. If you didn’t know that a man had died, you’d have no clue why everyone was drinking. 

That was the day she’d had her first drink. No one in the refrect, or the hall when she’d ventured down, feeling like she was defying the odds, questioned whether the doors should have been shut. It was the port, after all. If the port went, the colony’s viability became questionable. She’d never thought, not really, about the colony like an organism needing protection. Like a bubble on the surface of a liquid. Applied the thinking about equilibriums to the way in which they were living, and the count of bodies to it. The alcohol was harsh on her throat, and she blamed that for her tears.

To those core two, Ben had added one more, just for her. Every breath is a blessing and you need to use it for yourself, at no one’s direction but your own.

Her aunt Marcia was dying, slowly. That she knew, she’d known it since forever. Since she’d been old enough to notice the hacking coughs, in the train at night when the gravity kicked in, and the choking coughs in the refrect without the gravity to keep the fluids down in the lungs, where they seep in. Dying but not dead, is what Marcia says, when she’s asked by anyone who has the indecency to ask after her health, just like everyone else. She doesn’t eat. She drinks fluids, when she’s prompted by Juanita, or Ben, or Tam, but her oesophagus won’t cope with anything more, not any more. It’s been like that for years, and that’s their normal. When she remembers her parents, back when they were alive, they were never sick. A holed spaceship, and not enough O2 is what did for them, and a determination to rescue their kid. Ben herself, she doesn’t remember being sick either. 

Ben had assumed, once she’d learnt about what she was living in and why, that here on Vesta, people end up with cancer of various sorts. There’s only so much shielding, and the solar winds come when they want to, and Vesta has no atmo. She’d made the mistake of voicing that to a crew chief, Gato, one shift when she was fifteen, and been laughed out of sorts. Not for long, though, because she wanted to know why. 

“Look at the sky,” he’d said, and she’d turned her body, clumsy still in the adult suit. Looked through the visor and out into the pinpoints of light. He’d oriented her, towards the one star closer than the rest. “We don’t get much light? No? So we don’t get much of the rest. It happens, it happens. There are other things that kill you quicker.” 

He’d swung her back, but gently, to the rig she was working on. “Now fix this and stop talking about radiation. Yes?” 

She had. She didn’t talk about it, but she thought. Marcia must have lived closer in, she’d pieced together, at some point. Somewhere less shielded, too. 

Marcia’s not the kind to keep knickknacks, external memory signifiers, there will be nothing left of her but Tamsin once she’s gone. Those things get broken, she’d scoffed, one time when they’d walked through the whole train, some memorial day ago. One family cabin was lined with portraits, keepsakes, even wood, smooth to the touch until she snagged a splinter and the family shooed her out, worried she’d broken it. Broken things break other things. That’s what your brain is for, remembering, not your cabin. Write it down, if you don’t think you’ll remember it. That’s what people do. 

She hadn’t meant to find it, not really. She’d been looking for the meds, there’d been a coughing fit, Marcia struggling with it, and the meds in the refrect had run out, and she’d gone by herself to the train. It was quiet with no one else there, and if she’d thought about it, it was the perfect time to snoop, except that it wasn’t because she had to get the meds back to the refrect, and there wasn’t really   
time. She’d bumped the bunkhead awkwardly as she’d reached over to the shelf, to grab the medikit, and a piece of the head had moved, slightly. She’d gone to push it back in, and it wouldn’t, there was something in the way. She’d wiggled a finger in and found a memory stick. It was completely black, no label. No way of knowing, unless she was prepared to risk the security of her own device. And compromising her aunt’s privacy. So she’d left it. 

Her aunt Marcia had secrets. She didn’t look like a woman with secrets. She looked like, by the time Ben returned, a woman on the verge of death. Again. 

The steroids did the job, the mucus was extracted, and within a few minutes, her aunt was laughing, batting away stray bubbles of water, and propelling herself back to the door, ready to serve customers once more. With the kind of smile that infected, so that the room of strays, solitary drinkers with their own tumblers held tight, started to hum with conversations once more. She’d stayed behind, sucking up the goop, grabbing the wrappers, and wondering. She could hear her aunt laughing, her cousin giggling in the background. 

When she entered the refrect again, in search of the drain and the rubbish chute, her aunt Marcia was waiting, and her cousin was elsewhere, and her aunt Juan was gone. A gentle kiss on the cheek, and her aunt’s hands holding her still. 

“It’s only a cough. That’s all. The same as any other.” 

She’d shaken her head at her aunt. A million questions with no way to ask them. Questions about the past: how had her aunt come to have cancer in the first place? What was so precious that the memories had to be locked away, hidden even from her wife Juan? Questions about the present: how could her aunt pretend that she wasn’t sick, two minutes from choking once again? Questions about the future: how could she possibly go on like this? Didn’t she want to end it? Did she ever think about it? Her aunt’s eyes, one quirked eyebrow, and the smile still on her lips, the room still buzzing with life, silencing them all. 

That night, when her aunt Marcia had come to tuck her into the train bunk, she’d asked about how she’d met Juanita. How and when, and how she’d come to travel from Mars, and Earth before that. She’d asked about how Tamsin had come to be, full of the experience of her first kiss, a stolen moment with an apprentice on a shift, against the back of the PortAuth hall, an apprentice with stubble and old enough to know better than to kiss a fifteen year old, but young enough to do it anyway, who’d shipped out the next day, an into the black, and his name unimportant, but his lips soft and warm and memorable for a first kiss. Marcia had given her a glimpse of two very different people, and a courtship with coffee and long conversations, and a midnight kiss over a bar, when everyone else in the group with whom they’d come and drunk too much had left, and she’d fallen too hard into Juanita’s eyes, unable to give a coherent reason as to why she was doing that, unable to string the conversation along the more and more slender thread that they’d been stringing out in a less and less coherent fashion since the others had left, and kissed her, and kissed her again, and at that point, Marcia had stopped. She’d reset herself, and leapt forward to talk about how hard it was, or at least had been, for them to bring Tamsin into the world. Earth control over NF drugs for the colonies. Duplicate markets and back channels. Freedom. That conversation led to another, and another, in the alone moments, and the introduction of coding, and cyphers, and the importance of information, and the way in which her aunt kept the pulse for Vesta, and an eye open for the inner planets, and the belt, and a relationship which benefitted all and offended none. A giving back. 

Following from that, she’d had more questions, to which she hadn’t given voice, about exactly what her parents had been doing when their ship was hulled, and whether the space pirates who’d done it were really just space pirates, and in her free time, she’d started the process of examining the wreckage, under the cover of learning the trade of repairs. No one had questioned it. It had been the closest she’d ever felt to them, uncovering what she could of their secrets. There had been, eventually, a thumb drive. That one, she’d plugged into her device, and damned the consequences, and the risk had paid off. There’d been information, sure, it was a back up to one of their personal devices, and everything that had been on it. There’d also been secrets of no importance to anyone bar her, photos of her mother holding her baby self, all soft and curved into each other like a soap carving, photos of her father mugging for the camera like a loon, and one of her mother kissing her father on the cheek, arm extended to hold the camera out. Notes about the whats and wheres of the ship, reminders to each other to not forget that the air filter needed treating, that there was too much wear for comfort on the lifter, shopping lists, wish lists. Other notes. Snaps of moons that one had seen while the other was asleep, private jokes which were only too easy to decode and blush at, and sweet nothings written by her father, to the darling of his heart, who told him he was excessively corny, but there was no one that she loved more. All of it saved for ever, although their bodies were long gone, lost in the recycler. To have things worth saving, was what she was aiming for. The moments of joy along the way, not just the ones which keep the body alive.   
______________________________________________________

Styx: Have you found anything yet? Radio silence doesn’t suit you, Vesta. 

Vesta: If you’re that hungry for conversation, go to the refrect. Go to the port. Do something with someone. I do have to actually work. You were bloody lucky not to lose the lot, this time. 

Styx: So that’s a no, then. 

Vesta: Ding ding, give the man a prize. 

Styx: A prize is all that I want, and more than I deserve, my dear Vesta, but information’s actually what I’m after this time. 

Vesta: No information to give, Styx. We’re working on the outer hull first, and that’s a whole lot of pain right there, and you already know what happened to that. That’s going to take another couple of weeks, I’m guessing, because we’re making to order, and welding as we go. Good work takes time. You don’t want the outer to go for no good reason, right? There’s a whole lot of space out there that’d just love to meet your molecules, Styx. Makes a body wonder why you do it.

Styx: Why I do it? Love, Vesta. Love of the black. The way that the ship curves into it, and carves out a course for a new place, easy as a crunch of numbers. Sometimes, like love, it doesn’t go well. The curves are wrong, the Belt’s changed, the crew takes too long, and things get hurt. My mother was the one who taught me, and I feel her sometimes in the back of my head, in a nudge of the pencil, and I check the numbers again. She died down in a gravity well, and I’ve hated them ever since. The sunsets are beautiful. Blossoms on the plants, wind in the trees, air all around with no fear of a hull breach, but Earth killed my mother when the air bubbled out of her blood and into her heart, and she clutched at her elbows, and her knees, and she died in pain. Hay kept me on, for my mother’s sake, ostensibly, and because she had no one else to fill the role, not out in the black. I scrabbled myself into knowledge, and it gave me something to think about that wasn’t my mother. One day I realised that I loved it. And now, I’ve given you too much. Find yourself a ship’s manifest, and you’ll know me all too well, but I don’t know you. Something, Vesta, in recompense.

Vesta: My favourite colour is green. I have nightmares where I’m in space with no suit, childhood trauma of my own, don’t ask and I won’t tell, and no, I have no parents either. The black scares me, but I work in it anyway, and I think that tells you all you need to know about me. When I burrow into my sleeping bag at night, I close my eyes and I see the void opening up, and that doesn’t scare me at all, because I’m in a ship that can outrun them all, and it’s air tight and has a good pilot, and I can keep the engine running. I’m here because there’s no other place I can be me. I’ve never been down a gravity well, and when the sleep train runs at night, and presses me down into the mattress, it feels comforting. Enough?

Vesta: do we need to have the whole conversation about ideology, where we both sound like a pair over earnest twats? Or can we just agree not to talk about that bit, ever?

Styx: Agreed. I knew I liked you for a reason, Vesta. I mean, that and your incomparable good looks. And your sharp tongue.

Vesta: Nimble. 


	20. Casing the joint

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Fixing the Styx is going to take a great deal of elbow grease. She likes to know what she's in for, now, before she starts

She and the dock crew have worked a good fortnight and more. All the spare hull strength nanotube material that was to hand has been used. The fabricators are at work during all the shifts, making more, and she’s out in the black sweating it up, wishing for the relative cool air of the refrect, and wondering why there’s a smile on her face. For there is, despite it all. There’s a buzz in her chest as it comes together, her bit, anyway. The shifts have flown by, and she’s used all her offs for sleep, no energy to plaster the smile on her face and make nice with customers at the refrect. The Styx crew have settled into a routine there, and she doesn’t have the patience to hand over bulbs to increasingly surly Verde, and increasingly cocky Pods, who is now winning, she’s grown enough to admit it, the war of snark because she’s too tired for words even to form in her head, let alone to be assembled into cunning puzzles of acid, which is solely because she’s working double shifts on the seams, she’s finding bunks where she can on the sleep train, and seeing no one, eyes shut as soon as she draws the sleep curtains, and the weight presses down as the train accelerates, and gravity takes her into dreamless oblivion. Which is a relief. She’s no time for things like that. The priority is to mend the Styx, and the bonus side effect is to get the Styx crew off the station. Away from all the crawling worms that they are, down in its depths. She’s not still thinking about that. 

Tamsin has returned to her lab, and her green growing things, and Ben’s slightly comforted by this. There’s a healthy trade the family has built around her, not just the synth, but the things she’s been able to grow that no other station has, out here in the Belt. The living plants she’s coaxed into fruition, to seed, that people pay a premium for, in the pressurised confines of steel can living. The pepper vines that have a broader leaf, and thicker berries than the originals, but give the same kick. The cinnamon shoots, distant cousins to the rainforest trees, that won’t ever be allowed to grow to full height, even if they could, because they’re too greedy for space, for nutrients, but find a home in the refrects cooking on a constant basis with no complaints, less sweet and more savoury in their bite, which is well because the chillies are hit and miss, despite what the customers in the refrect think. Tam’s working on that, she says. The capsaicin bite is either overwhelming or non existent, like the birds eyes don’t know what to make of the environment, the artificial sun not quite to its taste. She’ll get there. No one but Tam has made the green area produce quite the same concentrated punch, the splicing and dicing and the weaving of the strain to find something that doesn’t just tolerate the low gravity and artificial light and strange combination of nutrients that the humans of Vesta produce and add to its soil, but thrives in it. Her mentor, now part of the soil of the green area himself, couldn’t do it, though he tried for years. There’s some strains that Tam preserves for, as best Ben can tell, nostalgia. Odd variants of vanilla, that come with a flavour that vanishes in the same way violet does, a trick of the memory rather than the wafting sweetness that Marcia says she remembers best of all else, the last time a shipment arrived with a vial of extract decades back. Ginger that was so gnarled it resembled a tree root, and couldn’t be used, too little fire and too much sourness, a thing that clearly didn’t want to be eaten. They’d eaten it anyway, back in the day, Marcia says. What he was good at, old Murray, was grains and tubers. Things, as he’d say, that aren’t sexy, but make your body stick to the rock. He’d said that the flavour experiments were a whole lot of rubbish, that what he wanted was to breed more metal salts into the grains and tubers, calcium for the bones, iron for the blood and something more for the brain, and improve life in a more substantial way, that Tam’s focus on the spice trade was more style over substance, and much work for nothing real. Tam would counter with impassioned arguments about what was real, and what was the point of living, in the way that only a teenager with no outlets for living could, which arguments would regularly be put on ice when the Styx came into port for trade and an outlet was provided. However, the tubers and the grains and the lupins do take up the bulk of the green area, and she and Ucombine, who doesn’t experiment, just rakes, and prunes and twines, tend them with diligence. The flavonoids may be good for flavour and trade, but the tubers, and the grains, and the lupins are essential for living. Get your priorities straight, Marcia says, and as far as Ben can see, Tamsin does.

There’s been no more talk to her about Tam taking to the black, and with her head engrossed in the all encompassing work of making the nanos play nice with each other, making the seams as tight as they can, she’s all but forgotten the mood she was in. All but. 

The damage to the Styx had been extensive. There’d been places where the hull had burst inwards, and others were repairing the internal damage on those. Disturbingly, there’d also been places where the hull had burst outwards, and those were all the water tank down one side, which must have concerned Verde, because a water system only works as a sealed loop if it remains sealed, and they’d be out by a long way on the water stores they need for another loop of the Belt. There’d be some trading going on, no doubt, or at least a try. Vesta would have to send itself a hip out to find a frozen asteroid, make up for the stores traded to the Styx. Green things don’t grow without water. 

Must have concerned Pod and Cantor because it would have thrown off the weighting, and she couldn’t remember seeing if there was a curve more than normal as they landed, it had looked stable. She’d been chatting after all. Concerning most of all because it was the same kind of damage as they’d had on Vesta when one of the near surface areas had overpressured and blown out. The same kind of damage as she’d seen when they’d used HE to blast a new chamber in, the last time they’d had new colonists settle. 

Working hypothesis was that someone on the Styx was the same level of unhappy with the people on the Styx as the pirate ship had been. Subsequent working hypothesis, not that she’d communicate this one up without some hard evidence, was that the someone was Verde. As quartermaster, he’d have access to stores without question, and security clearance to take himself anywhere on the ship, at any time, without question. The puzzler on both counts was why. She’d logged out early that shift, and sent a precis up for forwarding on, without comment, simply including the conclusions about the damage. She’d sent the same precis to her Styx comment, who hadn’t responded in any meaningful fashion. Couldn’t blame them. That would be an interesting piece of information to have to digest, knowing that one of your crew wanted you and everyone else dead. Yet another reason for Tam not to sign on.

She’s taken the opportunity to wander through Styx at the end of her shifts, just to see. Her Dog’s Breakfast is nowhere near as big, or as impressive as it, and it’s much homelier. Hers, because she’s piecing it together in off shifts, and from the cheaper end of the range, and because she started it when she was a teenager, a decade ago, parts of it are pink. Only parts of it, and she tells herself that she will replace them, once she has the credits, and the time. Which will be never. The Styx is all in uniform grey and navy blue, the navy as accents, and they’re charging the Styx more to pick out the details in blue because it takes longer to change over the drivers, and it’s fiddlier to do it right. They are doing it right, however, because they’re getting paid well, and the Styx is a good repeat customer. The passages are wide enough for five people to walk side by side, rather than her middling two. The storage is immense. Hers is not, and she has recoated all the little ones in the ceiling and floor spaces that have her convinced that her parents were in fact skirting the law, medpacks that were out of date by the time she found them, sweet smelling wood that she’s left in place, and visits occasionally, plant matter that had decayed into unidentifiable mulch, and information jotted on notepads, not memory sticks, hopelessly useless in its details of plots and shipping lanes long gone. She burnt the written, where to keep it might be embarrassing later. Buried the plant mulch in one of Tam’s experimental corners and hoped for the best. The medpacks were sent into the black. She has plans for those little cavities, for the time when she finishes completely and tests the seals herself. 

The Styx has a fully set up galley, compared to her little room. Hers has an oven, big enough for a crew of eight, but better for a crew of four, storage that assumes regular refuelling and one stovetop that works under gravity. The Styx has almost more gadgets than the nav deck, almost, four ovens and stovetops for the crew of eighty odd, storage for months, several rows of benches and tables that assume gravity all the time, and a place for communal drinking. She has little excuse to be in there, though, because those doors were sealed tight once the incident started, and they aren’t being used now. The refreshers in the Styx are positively luxurious, doubleheaded showers (although the water’s recycled) better than any they have on Vesta, and certainly better than the Dog’s Breakfast’s little closet. There are multiple WCs, big enough to fit into wearing a jumpsuit, which would be immensely practical. Not at all jealous making. She can’t change the dimensions of her ship to make it any bigger.  
The cabins are arranged along multiple hallways, both sides, redundancy being important, and indeed critical here, because several of them were taken out during the incident, and this by strafing, jagged edges from the two outer hulls bent in and in on themselves like broken ribs, any unlocked down possessions are lost to the void, and bedding materials with them. The effect is numbing. People died, died in their sleep, possibly. Died examining themselves in the mirror, thinking about the day ahead. Died taking their shoes off. Putting them on. Dead, those two kids making the letter W with their hands on their foreheads and smiling with bright teeth, bright eyes, in Cabin W. Dead. 

She’s not looking after that bit though, and she’s pushed on by Henry, who is. The next cabin along to the one she’d seen with the jagged edges has a picture of Pod and Cantor on it, mugging for the camera, Cantor pulling down the collar of his shirt to make a ‘v’ and Pod making the ‘v’ with his fingers in manner of professional tourists everywhere, and is marked Cabin V. She shouldn’t really investigate the cabin, she told herself as she went in. 

The cabin is airtight, but she leaves her suit on. That way, she’s not really in it. Or at least she can say she wasn’t. 

Cantor’s bunk is on the left, and it’s neat and crisp and well made. Hospital corners. There’s a poster of an astrochart on one side, with handwritten amendments to it, in equally neat writing, with the corners squared off against the verticals of the wall, and Cantor’s nameplate. Or so she imagines, she’s not going to get out a setsquare and check. Down by the bunkhead, near the zip for the pillow, there’s a smaller picture, and while it’s not of Tamsin, it’s a picture that Ben feels certain she’s drawn, a sample of a vanilla orchid, with roots and all, cross hatched and just as careful as her cousin. There’s a shelf for books, but there are none there. 

Pod’s bunk is less neat. It looks like he’s slept on top of it, the last time he slept here, an indent in the bunk that’s lasted despite the strafing, inertia being what it is. The corners are there, but they’d give if she tugged, which she doesn’t, because that would give the game away. There’s no pictures on his wall, but there’s the same chart, albeit without the neat writing and with scrawled notes, including several ‘here be dragons’, complete with tiny fire lizard drawings, and hoards of coins. There’s no books on his shelf, but there’s an outline, something’s been there. She’d bet that if she checked, there’d be something under his mattress, some hidden compartment, secrets. She’s not going to check. That’s a step too far in spades. She’d backed out carefully and sealed the door behind her, just in case.   
After that shift, she’d not explored further. There’s enough work to keep them busy on a double shift basis for a solid two more weeks. Even then, they’ll want to do a final week of inspections. No time for sightseeing.

This shift off, though, is compulsory. All of Vesta, every year. No work. It’s as annoying as all hell.


	21. An occasion for mirth

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Masks are worn, wheat is rumpled and conversations are overheard

Styx: tell me again why the next three shifts are off? Vesta, come on. Seriously. I mean I know it’s a big job, I can see that there’s much more to do and you all need a break, but three shifts? Excessive.

Vesta: that’s the point. This is the point where we’re all made, whether we want to or not, to stop and recognise that we’re not dead yet, we’ve exceeded all projected life expectancies for this station. It’s a party, Styx, and because you’re here, you’re going to have to wear it.

Vesta: What’s the big hurry anyway? I mean, apart from the delivery of cargo, taking on water for a place that isn’t an actual rock, making orbitals, and those trifling matters? 

Styx: ha. If you think someone on board planted a bomb, I mean, let’s call it what it is, then it’s something we need to deal with now, not in three shifts time. Nothing to stop them planting a bomb here now, you know, Vesta. 

Vesta: Listen, I’m not arguing. I’m not. But that’s in itself, the reason why. Carpe diem.

Styx: Fine. I get it. Rationalise away the masks? 

Vesta: Plausible deniability. Things happen at this party, and when you see the same faces every day, you don’t want to necessarily know that you did the things that you did with that face. There’s only about a thousand people on this rock. Only twelve hundred or so right now with you lot stretching our hospitality. I mean, you’re welcome, but you have to admit, the place is a little crowded right now. Huis clos, and all that. So get unfamiliar. The masks are all the same, they go in a sanitiser at the end, reissued next year. If you don’t want to take part, you don’t have to. Stay in your bunk for the night. The kids do that too. No judgement either way.

Styx: You’re making a judgment face, I can tell. I feel like you’ve already judged me for asking the question. I’ve had it pointed out to me, in no uncertain terms, that I make too many assumptions. I have, on this very colony, managed to so offend a person that they’ll never speak to me civilly again, even if I was wearing a mask. You’re the only person I trust here, Vesta. If you tell me to, I’ll go pick up a mask, and hope to run into you instead, whether I know that it’s you I’m running into or not, and trust to my luck on that one. And to my luck too that the maniac with the penchant for blowing things up doesn’t strike before the shifts are over. Fair enough?

Vesta:

Vesta:

Vesta: This isn’t my judgment face. It’s my you’re being as cute as all hell and I shouldn’t want to do anything about that face. It’s my stop it with all of this because the risk’s not worth it face. 

Styx: In case you’ve forgotten, my life’s in peril already. Every day. So’s yours, really. What’s a little more peril between friends? We are friends, aren’t we, oh sweet tongued Vestan contact, who hasn’t yet told me to go boil my head in the vacuum of space, no matter how annoyed they might be at all my questions about the repair? I bet, if I found you, you’d agree it was worth the risk.

Vesta: You might want to reassess the risk you’re running, Styx. 

Styx: Ah, Vesta, you fool. The risk is the reason to run.  
__________________________________________________  
It’s a busy night in the refrect, but no one of the usual staff is serving. Ben’s been told by her aunts that she’s to go and have fun, for once in her life, with the other young folk. Like she’s a kid at the school disco being sweet talked off the wall. Her aunts are both serving, the food’s all been predone, and the bulbs are flowing freely. Her hands are sticky already with spills, and she’s licked them clean. She’s eaten something salty, something sweet, and something sour, but the fire in her belly’s all hers. The risk is the reason to run, she thinks, and somersaults off the wall, and towards the door. She’s restless tonight, and keen to run a risk or two. 

Tamsin’s waiting, mask free, at the door. She knows who she’s waiting for. Ben wishes, sometimes, that she was as simple as Tam sometimes. That there’d been a click in her gut, the way Tam calls it, when she’d looked at someone, someday, and known that the person was worth the plunge. A click in the gut years in the making, really, for Cantor and Hay and the Styx have been visiting the rock on and off forever, or at least since Cantor and Tam were too young to be anything but innocent, and friends before that, and then at some point known only to them, said click in the gut occurred. She’s aware that if she thinks hard about it, her Styx contact must have been visiting the rock on and off forever too, and if she thinks even harder, with the details they’ve spilt this visit, she could figure out which of the hundred or so they are. She could ask Cantor, and with one question he’d know who she was talking about. She’d have a name.

Hay is here already, her short grey hair like a helmet buttoned down around her head. She’s not bothered with a mask either, and she’s making conversation, making herself useful by passing the food and the bulbs with Ben’s aunts. And she’s watching Tam out of the corner of her eye, appraising the woman who her son is trying to steal. Or, thinks Ben less charitably, waiting for the right moment to step in on his behalf. Hay’s mouth has dimples, and she’s currently laughing, not a polite chuckle, but a big belly laugh, grey hair moving around her head now like feathers, and perhaps it’s not the worst place in the world for Tam, if there are people on board the Styx that laugh like that. 

She’s a little buzzed, and she finds herself laughing too, quietly. The room is spinning, or she is. The room’s a little warm, and there are people buzzing with the music, masked faces on masked faces, and it feels too good. In the exact way that being alone in the dark in the vacuum doesn’t. She’s a full stomach, and a drink or two more inside than she usually does, and all her muscles are relaxed, she’s not holding on to the bar tonight, she’s drifting, she’s tumbling slowly like a kid learning the way of low grav, she’s let go. 

“At the risk of sounding hopelessly cheesy, see anyone you like?” There’s a voice at her back, and she knows it all too well. It’s a voice that pops up in her dreams from time to time and makes her curl her toes. It’s a voice that makes her want to punch someone. She knows, before she turns around, that he’ll be wearing a stupid mask, and stupid smile, and she’s no idea why he’s picked tonight to try his luck. Does he really think she won’t remember his voice? Or does he think it’s been long enough that he’s forgiven? 

The mask is white and unadorned, one of the stranger masks that they keep in a dispenser at the entrance. He’s made absolutely no effort, but then, when she looks around the space, neither has anyone else from off the rock. White faces everywhere, interspersed with the patterned ones that Vestans swap every year. Cantor’s at the front door, white faced with nervous tension, rather than a mask, and the smile on Tam’s face is unbearably bright, all teeth, all twinkles. The sourness on Verde’s intensifies, and she can see Hay clock it, gently spinning her stool over to block the view of the happy couple.   
She takes another sip from the bulb, feeling it burn down her throat, the ginger lighting a path, the alcohol putting it out. “I see plenty of people to take notice of, but no one I’d particularly like to know better. If that’s what you mean.”

She hasn’t slurred any of her words, yet, or spilt a drop. Not so as you’d notice.

“I’d like to get to know you better, if you’ll give me another chance. To see you smile without that mask,” he says and he’s not slurring his words either. Not so as she’s noticed. 

“I see, for instance, that Cantor’s taking his sweet time in proposing an off shore trip for my cousin. There’s not that much time left on the rebuild that he can afford to take it.” She gestures in the general direction of the corner where Tam’s holding on, slightly above her mothers, and to the left of Hay, and in the close proximity of Cantor.

He steadies her, a hand on her waist, and she hadn’t realised her shirt had lifted. His hands are warmer than they have any right to be.

“Watch then, because I bet Hay’s doing it for him. Not the best, is Cantor, at saying the sweet things. He moves without thinking and he certainly acts without talking about it. Might have the voice of an angel, but he’s the imagination of a pea. Yes, see, that’s her hands in his, and Hay’s on them both. Done and dusted. She’ll ship with us when we leave, no doubt.”

She takes another, harder, pull at the bulb. The ginger is fire.  
“She’ll regret it. Our green patch won’t thrive without her, and that’s like an extension of her soul. Cantor, or her life’s work? She should stay. That’s enough talking about other people, for now. You asked me, remember, did I see anyone I liked. Was it Tamsin you were wondering about?”

He barks out a short, startled laugh. His hand tugs at her, and spins her back into his arms, and the couple’s out of sight. An orbit of two, up in the dark nook of the refrect, behind the speaker, and the screen, with the bass track pulsing, and the risk is the reason to run, and his face is right there under the mask, but she’s still feeling the fire, and she can’t leave it alone anymore.

“Have you,” she asks, all innocence, as he leans down and she can feel his breath ghosting on her lips, “seen Podraig at all tonight? You know, Cantor’s best friend. Or minder, one of the two. I think Hay keeps him on principally to keep Cantor from running into things. I’m surprised he’s not down there feeding Cantor lines to feed to Tam.”

He leans back, and they drift a little, out of the screen’s shadow. She can’t quite see his eyes under the mask. “Are they good lines, is that what you’re saying? He’s the man with the moves?”

She laughs, and the gust of it pushes her back. “The moves? He’s the man with the moves? If he is, he’s learnt them far from here. When he’s here, he’s the man with the foot in his mouth, which takes some doing at close to zero g. He’s the man with the lines, who makes people laugh, who can’t close the deal. Who doesn’t quite get it. Who can’t take the risk. Podraig,” she hisses, “is no doubt, far from here, thinking up his next clever thing to say, and his next exit line, before he needs it.” 

She’s released, and back into the light completely, drifting back down into a nearby cushioned stool. “Did I say something?” she whispers, and he pushes back off the wall, to flank her. She wonders whether she’s gone too far, been that little edge too cruel, as Tam rockets over, a beam of oblivious sunshine. It’s the way in which his face twists around his mouth.

“I have things to do.” His voice is terse, and he’s not looking at her now, but his shoulder touches hers, and she’s spun ever so slightly. “Things to do anywhere else but in your presence. Captain Hay, I do believe there was a long list of things you posted for volunteers. I’m going to go and sign myself up for the ones that take the most time and need to be done the furthest away from here. From her.”

Hay laughs, and Ben notes it’s actually quite a nice laugh, a welcoming one rather than a mocking one, one she should aim to emulate. Not that she’s going to. She is what she is.   
“The only thing I’m looking for from my crew tonight is a party. Stay and celebrate with us, because I’ve found our new food scientist, Llew’s stepping out to enjoy the delights of Vesta’s low grav, and Tamsin will be stepping in to take on the challenge.” Hay says, and Llew, all smiles and grey hair and wrinkles, tips his bulb in Podraig’s direction, and Ben’s stomach churns.

“If that’s true, then I’ll have shift after shift to celebrate that decision. Right now, I’m trying to know someone a little less. Your pardon, Tamsin.” He’s gone, pushing off the floor and making the entrance in one elegant glide. 

Hay shakes her head. “I don’t know what you said to him, not that I’m meant to know who you are, or who he is, but I hope it was worth it, Ben.” 

Her stomach turns again, and there’s a cold pit where the fire’s burnt out. “You’ll have to pardon me too, Captain Hay. History can’t be rewritten just because someone slaps a mask on their face and says some pretty things when he can’t be held to them. No. I’ll wish you all a good night instead and take off to bed. One repair job at a time, thanks.”

She tips her head to them all and slides her mask up. As she’d expected, Pod’s nowhere to be seen, and she’s half disappointed. Her brain had finally conjured up some other choice insults to offer up and that was all to waste now. Cantor’s looking bemused at her, like she’s unexpectedly punched a hole into a bulkhead, and Tam’s shaking her head. Hay’s smiling, but it’s thin. Her aunts are circulating the room again, Marcia with the food, Juanita with the bulbs, and she doesn’t need to be here anymore.

Outside, the hallways are moderately dark, sociably so rather than a blanket black. Enough light to see the waysigns, carved into the rock, and the fronts carved for the homes and shopfronts, the lamps glow in their nooks, and it’s a thoroughly romantic warm glow that lights the halls down to the sleeping rooms, the burrows with their custom wood style hatches, a beautiful night. For Tamsin and Cantor and all the other couples who don’t hate each other. 

She turns and faces the other way, resolutely. She doesn’t need to be in bed just yet, she’s not tired, not really, and the idea of crawling under the blankets and zipping them shut like a coffin makes her stomach churn. Or perhaps that’s the acid from earlier.

It’s a short hop to the train, and the train takes no time at all to deliver her to the green dome. There’s Ucombine, patiently tucking root nodules into place, she sees on the other side of the expanse, and he gives her a nod, no mask in place for him, he’s not interested in those games anymore, had he ever been, only his work, and the growing of the green. She nods back, and takes herself into the wheat wall. The grass smell is intoxicating. As long as she sticks to the path for the gardeners, she won’t damage anything, and so she does, but she runs her hands through the stalks as she passes, and the waves of her passing run up the wall. From here, the green dome is more of a green bowl, all centred about the fig tree in the middle, greedy for space and sunlight. If she squints, she can see the orchard about the other wall, with the extra fence about it, and she can make out the birds flitting valiantly at the net, examining it for loopholes. There’s none.

She can smell the flowers in the air, light and sweet. Probably a citrus. They’re perpetually confused, Tam says, by the light and the ever present chill, despite the best efforts of the heaing system. The light’s different, Tam also says. There’s too much of it, in the upper and lower wavelengths. No filter. There’s no way of filtering it, not properly. Tam had launched into an explanation of magnetic fields, and solar waves, and the way in which plant cells react on a molecular level, mutated mitochondria, and Ben had listened, but her focus had been on the drillbit she was sharpening. Tam could have been talking about anything to do with plants, quite honestly, and she wouldn’t have remembered. 

Objectively, she can see that Tam might want a new challenge. That working with gravity under thrust would give different constraints to working in close to null, with rock that doesn’t want to give way, with a system that isn’t ever quite water tight. How, for instance, would Tam deal with the lack of the pollinators? There’d been no insect or bird life on the Styx that she’d seen that would fit the gap Vesta’s filled with little flitterbugs and swallows and she had no idea how you’d deal with that on board. Tam would, or she’d know where to start. She can feel the soil under her fingers, gritty and cold, despite the warming system, and real, not speculative, the end product of the first stage of terraforming, not the start of it. If your life’s work, you’ve decided, is to make things grow, then why turn your back on something so promising? 

She rubs the soil between her hands, down her pants in a soothing fashion, down her legs, up at the end, and start at the top again, leaving a little trail of brown behind. Her good pants, at that. Swats a little fly out of the air, and another from her sweat. Her ship has only really enough greenspace for four people, it’s a small ship, and she’s never been that fussy. As long as she comes back here on the regular, and why wouldn’t she, they’ll sell her the spices she likes, the synth cinnamon, the pepper from the vines dripping down from the fig, the green tasting cardamom. She can eat any amount of grown fungus and vat meat if she has the spice to go with it. Thanks to Tam’s work here, and in the synth, she will. That is, as long as this greenspace is here. Life is uncertain, Ucombine says, on the times that he says anything, gnarled little man that he is. Eat dessert first, Ben always says back. She doesn’t particularly like dessert, per se, but the idea of being deprived of it without a choice, that galls. The body wants what it wants, and the cortex doesn’t have much to do with it, present circumstances of sitting in the dirt at the instigation of said cortex over said body notwithstanding. Tam would laugh. Tam always does. Tam never does anything without thinking it through, and making a rational decision. Hence, Tam is off somewhere in a low dimmed nook, no doubt, with a warm man to ward off the cold. And the warm man is instead in the long term taking her into the cold, and Ben’s all angry again.

Which is when she hears the voices, and of course there’s no escape from the happy couple, not even here, because if you were Tam, and you were happy, of course you’d go and find your green. Lord only knows how she’s planning to do that on the Styx. The green room is functional, not a happy place. The voices are now loud, and she tucks herself as far into the wheat as she can without crushing the stalks, and hopes that they’re quick and quiet about whatever it is that they’re here to do, and hopes that they’re not here to do anything too embarrassing.   
She hears Tam greet Ucombine, and exchange some information dense conversation, with no input from Cantor, and then the voices increase in volume, and she can see that they’re hauling themselves into the tree, carefully no doubt, to avoid breaking off any suckers, and any hanging roots. 

“I can’t believe that you said yes. That you’re going to be with me, on my ship, for good and always.” Cantor says, all in one big breath, like the lovesick boy that he is.

“Of course I said yes. I’m always going to say yes to you.” And then there’s noises that Ben doesn’t want to identify too closely, and perhaps hiding in the wheat wall wasn’t the way to go, and she should have tried to make good her escape when they came in, and avoided the whole thing.

“I promise you, you’ll be so busy on board that you won’t have time to miss this.” And more noises.

“I will miss it, though. This tree, for instance. I grew up with it. I used to be small enough to fit between its root stems, and play that this was my house. Down there was my secret haven from my mothers, from Ben, from everyone. I used to swing from the branches around and around it, like a monkey? I learnt how to move here. And up here on this branch,” and the branch rustles, “was the place I first kissed you. Or you first kissed me. One of the two. Of course I’m going to miss it. But that’s fine. Honestly.” And more noises still. She’s going to have to leave or knock herself out with her own fist.

“And you’ll miss Ben. Of course. And your mothers.”

“I will miss them so much. But not as much as I’ve missed you. I’ve missed you so much. I can’t believe that we’re finally going to be together every day. Every shift. I can wake up and know that I’ll see you that shift, not next year, or next month but in hours that I can count, not days. I can’t wait.”

“I can’t wait for a time when I’ll have someone to talk to who isn’t Podraig. I do love him, I mean. He’s a great mate. An excellent navigator. It’s just that he has this thing that he does.”

“What thing?” 

There’s a gap, and Ben realises that she’s crushing the wheat, leaning through it to hear closer. She releases the stalks she has in her hand, and leans back slowly, and the wheat sighs like a breeze. 

“He’s one of those people that if you hand him a perfect apple, red and shiny and crisp, he’d complain that it wasn’t as good as the one apple he had that time when he was on Earth, when he was five. You point out a sweet constellation, and he’ll tell you that it’s too far for the ship and the fuel and besides there’s a black hole or two in the way. A pretty girl could walk into the refrect, and he’d, well. You know.”

“The thing with?”

“The thing with how she’s some kind of miracle girl to whom no one can and should be compared. The thing with how you never get over your first, even if you hate her and she hates you. The thing where,” and he’s cut off abruptly. 

“Hey, you better not get over your first. That’s me, right?” Tam sounds indignant, but fake indignant. Ben can just imagine the face she’s pulling. 

“Of course it’s you. Once you find the perfect one, why try anything else? You’re perfect for me. So smart, and so pretty, and so- ”. There’s a pause. A long one.

“So what? Finish the sentence. And make it a good one. This might be the last time we’re in this tree together and I want good memories.” Tam sounds fake indignant again.

“So –“ and there’s something whispered, and Tam giggles, and there’s the noises. Lots of them. They do remember that Ucombine is right over there, vaguely in eyeshot? There’s probably a couple of the cameras on them too, the ones that Tam uses to obsessively check over her plants, that is when she’s not playing with synth chemicals to come up with her next blockbuster spice replacer. Which means, Ben realises, that Tam will definitely see her when she plays back the footage. If she does it before she bids the station farewell, that is. Seeds of a plan form. 

“It’s not even as if she’s that pretty. She’s so, well, boxy, with all those muscles. And that scar? I don’t care how cool the story is, it’s distracting. Not like you, my wood nymph, creature of this tree that you are, all long and slender and twining like. I just don’t see it. And she’s nowhere near as smart as you. I don’t think a smart mouth means anything. She’s bored by anything that doesn’t involve a tool. I just don’t see it.”

“Hey. I think she’s pretty enough. And she’s a different kind of smart. You don’t have to see it, but you do have to respect it. Back off.”

There’s silence for a little minute, and Ben waits for the next volley. 

“It’d be pretty wild if she jumped ship with you too, wouldn’t it?” Cantor’s continuing. “I mean, Pod would flip his lid. You’ve seen how she shuts him down, like, constantly. Endless entertainment.”

“Entertainment for you, maybe. Think about how it’d be after a month or six. One of them would be dead. Would that still be entertaining then? Don’t be a carrot.” Tam’s starting to sound genuinely indignant. 

“I like carrots, thank you. You’re probably right. You usually are. But the first couple of weeks’d be a hoot. Ben and Pod on the same ship. People’d pay money to see that.”

She’s ruined this clump of wheat, for sure, all clenched up in her fist like that. There’s too much to process, and so she focusses on the stalks, and releasing her fingers slowly, and trying to straighten them back out. Contemplates pulling them out, and leaving a patch bare, and then reckons that she’ll be in more trouble for that than the original damage, and she should leave bad enough alone. She can hear movement too, which is worse, they’re climbing down from the tree, and she doesn’t know which way they’re going, and she can’t think of anything but hiding. She lies, even to herself. She’s thinking about more than hiding. She’s thinking about a night a decade ago, or thereabouts, that old Benita takes out and dusts off every so often, and snorts at young Ben, so foolish and hopeful and for all her posturing, so naïve. She’s thinking about an older Pod, tricking that night up into something more magical than Cinderella could invent, a fairy tale with her at the centre of it, and she’s trying not to laugh, because that’s nowhere near what happened. She still remembers the way her body flushed cold with the shame of it, for having the rose tint ripped from her into the cold blue of a financial transaction, and the chill of the metal door as she slammed it being nothing to the pit of her stomach, and how she’d cried herself sick with the anger afterwards, until there was nothing left in a stomach that had already been empty. She wants to punch Cantor in his smart mouth, for calling her unpretty, and unsmart, even if she knows it to be true in comparison to Tam. She is too bulky, but she needs the bulk for what she does. She doesn’t look in mirrors if she can help it, and she doesn’t have the same attention to detail on her face that Tam has. She could hide the scar, she supposes, with hairstyles, and whatnot, but she doesn’t see the point. She doesn’t get off on abstract modelling the way that Tam does, and she is better with a tool in her hand, but for all that, if Cantor’s face happened to find its way in front of her fist, she wouldn’t object. She rubs at the scar, but she’s thinking about truth, and whether Tam and Cantor are telling it, and whether she wants them to be.

It’s not until after Tam and Cantor have left, floating their way through the green space like creatures too happy to be bound by such mundane things as gravity, and she’s extricated herself into the cold corridors, and lurked down into her sleeping quarters, that she realises that if Tam, perched in her favourite tree, was higher than Ben, down on the wheat walls below, no amount of wheat stalks would have been sufficient to hide her from their laughing eyes, and that they knew perfectly well what they were saying, but she doesn’t have headspace enough to think it through, as to whether that means they were speaking truth, or another fairy tale to lead her astray.

She’s too tired to think about whether she wants to be.


	22. Season of the which

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> All that listening makes a body tired

They’re on the last stretch of the hull repair now, and his correspondent has gone quite quiet. No further commentary on the doings of Vesta since the Foundation Day shindig. Not that he’s aware that anything’s happened. He’s nothing to report to his correspondent either, but he’s bored. He’s projected all the possible targets in the next quadrants to Vesta over and again, and there’s nothing new to be learnt there. There’s no new information about anything further out, either. He’s a navigator without anything to navigate for the time being, and he’s bored. His stump has developed an itch, too, which is beyond irritating. If he had things to do, asteroids to interrogate, plans to make, he wouldn’t be thinking about rubbing up against sharp objects all the time. All the time. It’s too cold on 4-Vesta. 

All the time. Cantor walking around permanently attached to Tamsin, with that stupid wide perfect smile of his is rubbing him up worse than sharp objects, worse than the prickle of a misfitted prosthetic. Worse than his frost bite from the walk from her sleeping quarters in the altogether, that night when he’d had to find shelter in the PortAuth sleeping quarters and defrost after, worse still. He needs to be gone, and he can’t be.

At least, at the very least, his bunk aboard is airtight again. He can and will and has retreated, except that he feels like this is conceding ground, ground that he didn’t have to concede to her in the first place. He’d rather run the risk of being sealed in while the crew fix the final stretch, than run the bigger risk of having to make polite conversation, when she so clearly can’t. His bunk is less comfortable than he recalls, however, and he’s been told by Hay that he can’t sleep aboard until the hull’s all done, and so he lies on his back, tucked in but not quite zipped up, and he stares at the ceiling. There are fourteen tiles across, and twenty down, and he’s counted them many nights over to be sure. 280. Cantor’s bunk is below, and he always drops off straight away, unless he wants to talk. The talking is usually about Tamsin, and Vesta, and the future, and Pod’s sharply aware that he’s not sure what’s to happen now that Tam’s shipping aboard. He rubs at his chest, but the tightness won’t go. There’s a spare double bed room, that’s further down the hall. Presumably that will be the newlyweds, once it all happens, which is fast approaching. He’ll be empty. 

He zips himself up in the sleeping pod, just to practise. It’s soothing in here, like a cocoon, although he’s no butterfly. Perhaps a moth.

The hatch door slides open, and he has a moment of panic, that the hull’s been breached again, and he lets his mouth open, against every natural instinct to hold his breath, so that his lungs won’t burst, but there’s no telling hiss. The noise instead is the very familiar sound of his roommate’s hum, and presumably the other person entering with slightly less grace is Tamsin, because when they’re on Vesta, there’s no Cantor without Tam, or vice versa. He gives up on any expectation he ever has of a decent conversation with Cantor when they’re in port, which is a shame, because he could really use a sounding board. He can close the deal. He’s closed plenty of deals. She’s just sour because she’s stuck here, and he’s not, and once upon a million years ago he got her wrong. For which he’s apologised. Or had he? It’s too long ago to remember. Not that he cares. The question is whether he can be bothered with it all. There’s option A, find a candidate to schmooze for a short term only, Meg or Urtz would do, upfront and honest, to kiss and canoodle with in front of her very face, and leave behind at the end of the trip with no regrets, and both sides satisfied, because he knows he can do better than he had when he was nineteen, he’s had compliments a plenty in every other port, so why should 4 Vesta be different? It won’t be. Option B is schmooze her, and only her, and at the end of the stay end it, in as vicious and cutting a fashion as she had, so that at the end of the term portside, he can leave it, leave her behind knowing he’s won. There’s a more visceral appeal to that one. He doesn’t fancy Meg or Urtz all that much, anyway. They’re long and lean, and slender, not his type, but Cantor’s, or at least, they’re the same build as Tamsin, which amounts to the same. Not that Cantor would. Not that Cantor, point of fact, is. He’s ceased with the humming at least, switching over to yet another of the old folk songs that end too unhappily for Pod’s taste.

“Do you have much to pack,” Tamsin is asking, in a pointed fashion that tells Pod that she’s over the old unhappy folk songs too, “or should I leave you here? I don’t want to miss the train.”

“Oh, my very darling. Ten minutes, and I’m done. Most of the things in the cupboard belong to Podraig, wherever he’s run away to. Just let me pull it together. You’d best brace for the smell.”

Podraig stifles a gasp, as Cantor opens the cupboard. There’s apparently a very dead sandwich in Cantor’s half, or he hasn’t bothered with his washing for way too long, and the choked sounds Tamsin’s making don’t give much of a clue. It doesn’t matter, whatever it is, is rank, and the seconds while Cantor is carrying the whatever it is to the recycler are long and tortuous.

“I can’t believe I’m shipping with you. That’s not going to fly on my watch, prettyboy,” Tamsin says, and gags.

“It wouldn’t have flown on Pod’s watch either if he’d known about it, my friend. He’s a stickler. Precision, waking up on time, getting it right or trying again until you do, that’s Pod. He’s a pain in my prettyboy butt. He never shuts up either. There’s always something he wants to talk about. MacBeth was the topic of last week, a very long ago dead play, with so much blood and violence is should have been called MacDeath. You’ll be a much easier roommate than him.”

Podraig tries not to be offended. He is a little bit. He’d thought Cantor was interested. 

“That’s what you say now. I talk in my sleep, you know, according to Ben.”

“Really? Did she say about what? Me?”

“No, she never says. I’m sure she wouldn’t have missed an opportunity to dump on you, ‘monsieur love’, as she calls you, which is not a compliment.”

There’s an itch on his nose, which he can’t quite reach without rustling the sleeping bag. He’s not sure if he wants to give away his position just yet. There’s always a chance that they’ll leave first. He doesn’t want to face Cantor just yet. 

“No, I’m sure. Perhaps that’s a good enough reason for not regretting that she’s not shipping with us after all. Still.”

“Still, it would at least put an end to the complaining over Podraig. She’s still not over him, you know, not really. Any time I think she’s going to make a fellow more than a one off fling, back up it comes like vomit. All the things he said and didn’t say, and all the things he’s done since then or hasn’t done, and how can she trust any one ever. Sometimes she talks in her sleep. She says his name. Breathes it, rather.” Tamsin sounds sincere, but the words she’s saying are utterly ridiculous. Beyond belief so far on a course that he couldn’t navigate if he tried. He’s going to give that statement the credence it merits, which is none. He’s not going to think about it. She’s a witch.

“Not going to happen. There’s no need for an extra ship mech on board. Our team of six is more than enough for any on board emergency,” Cantor’s saying, and Podraig would just love to correct him, to remind him that it wasn’t in any way enough to fix the broken Styx this last go around, and that it was only the inboard seals that saved enough of the on board atmosphere to allow them to limp in to 4 Vesta with the limited death that had been their lot, rather than everyone biting at vacuum. A talented mech like her, anyone’d be lucky to have. She’s quite good when she’s not in his immediate presence. It’d be nice if she was quite good in his presence too. And not a witch. Still.

Tamsin sighs. “Are we done yet? I need to sleep. It’s been too long a day and I need to sleep. I don’t want to miss the train.”

There’s a zipping noise. “All done.”

There’s a pause, and Podraig can feel the air move, as they exit, and the hatch door reseals.

He unzips the sleeping pod. The room feels bigger, looks brighter, with the astrochart poster down. Cantor’s sleeping pod feels empty, even though it’s only the same level of locked down as it ever is. Which is a good thing, Pod reminds himself. They’ll both be happier with Cantor bunking with Tam. There’s no reason why the room needs to feel like a hermit shell.

It’s option B.


	23. Do you want to live forever?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There's an explosion.   
> She's calling it.

The hull is on final checkover, crew members starting to move their personal effects back on board, trolleys all lined up at the dock, a burble of excited noises, when there’s a thump that she feels, and she’s not even on the ship at the time, the kind of percussive thump that comes only from HE disruption and she thinks for a minute that she can see cracks in the port sealant, cracks that vanish as she looks at them. The helmet snicks into her suit, one two, until she hears the click down and the hiss of pressurised air seeping in. There’s a throng of suits pushing their way in, a swarm of all the port crew she’s been working alongside like green ants in a nest. She sees the striped arm of a suit there that belongs to Greenwell, her first teacher in the ways of space hulls, and in there also is Rejak, her first teacher in the ways of a lot of other things, and she’s never been one to be shy about indulging her curious, especially where it involves the blatant destruction of her work, and she’s swept up as part of the swarm. She sees the breach immediately, but that’s only because it’s the section she’s been on last. It’s the hull by Pod and Cantor’s cabin, and it’s been blown from the inside again, big jagged edges of metal emerging like a starfish seeking to extrude its stomach into the black, atmos bleeding out into space. Anyone inside would have been wearing a suit, and have a helmet and tank within reach, surely. Surely.

She shouldn’t really need to go and check on them. There’s no reason for anyone to have been in the cabins in any case. Plus it’s against Vestan customs and common sense. Even if they had ben there, they should have been able to get themselves out. She can’t remember now exactly who was on the inspection party, other than the Captain, and of course, Verde. Somehow her legs keep moving in that direction anyway. Besides, she’s properly ticked off now. All that good work, all that sweat down her spine and hours of holding instruments still, and being too tired to think straight, and all for nothing.   
The swarm breaks up as people find the spots they’d been working on, inspect the damage, calculate the hours added to the job. 

She’s at the hatch, and there’s no pressure, no trapped atmos to watch for, but she still braces in case, as she swings it free. There’s no floating bodies. She can feel the wrongness in the way the corridor’s warped, even before she reaches the hull breach. It’s clear that someone’s played with more HE than last time, and played to win, not just to delay. She’s not sure that there’s enough metal on Vesta to fix this, not properly. The first repair job had been more in the way of a fix on the nanos, and this, this was more in the way of a structural issue. Sections stabbing inwards like dragons’ teeth, in addition to the ones pointing out, poking into the port stanchions, and now that she sees it from the inside, in a way that’s bent one of them too. Which is going to be a bear to fix. 

She’s trying to remember now whether her Styx correspondent had made any mention of any dissent amongst the crew, any infighting, any disagreement, and she’s drawing a blank. They’d been long on chat about Cantor and Tam, and she’d admit to a certain level of an overtone of sorts, a reading between the lines into a life she imagined she’d have one day with someone off the rock. The chat had been short on anyone else’s personal lives, which, to be fair, hadn’t been exactly relevant before now. Slightly more relevant now with a hole that’d go a ways to filling the Albert Hall in the side of the ship. 

Now that she’s inside, she can’t see any crushed suits, or blood, or anything particularly troublesome. She’d half imagined herself the hero, plunging in to save the Captain, or better yet, Podraig, so that she could rub it all in his face, with superhuman strength and her unattractive muscles and scarred face pulling the bulkhead back off an appropriately appreciative Cantor who determines that Tamsin will stay on Vesta, and so will he, but there’s no one there to save. Just the gap in the hull, and the charts half ripped off the walls. She can see the burn marks on the floor, where the floor starts to break, as it turns into bulkhead, turns into wall, the bed she’s pegged as Cantor’s is half out the hole, jammed in the metal, sheets up and bleeding through, now motionless. The rush of atmos must have stopped before she entered, she can’t feel any tug, and she half gasps when she feels the hand on her shoulder pulling her back towards the door. 

She’s not used to being towed. She’s usually the one doing the rescue. It’d be comforting if she knew who was rescuing her, and she tries to turn, but swings her suit into the frame, like a newbie, and her leg inside the suit twangs, and all for nothing, because she can’t see who it is. Dragged backwards like a duck on a string for the two minutes it takes to reach the ship’s airlock, jammed open now for the flocks of people coming out, unsuccessful tourists. Of course, it’s him. Why wouldn’t it be? She doesn’t want to be grateful to him, and she is, and it’s making her itchy and uncomfortable.   
She leaves her mike off. The airlock’s a million miles long, suddenly, and the air’s too dry in her suit. She doesn’t want to talk to anyone. There’s a million bees buzzing in her ears, and she needs some space to think about it. When the airlock cycles through, she bounces for the corridor, and leaves him behind. 

The refrect’s too noisy. Everyone, in their suits still, helmet and spare O2 tank at the ready, talking loudly, with an eye to watch the emergency lights, just in case. Her room’s too small, and the air’s stale. There’s no one in the corridors, and she makes the exit cleanly. The surface is quiet, and her vision’s full of stars.  
_______________________________________________________  
Vesta: I don’t know if you saw it. I don’t know if you were on board. I do know that it has to be one of you that did that, and I’d be very happy to see the back of you all, if I thought it was safe for you to leave.

Styx:

She shouldn’t have expected an answer, not an immediate one. If Styx has set up a relay, it could have been dislodged by the blast. If Styx hasn’t, there’ll be no response at all until they’re back on board,   
and after today, that could be weeks. Her stomach’s cold, despite the warming pads in the suit, internal not external losses. Keeps typing, anyway.

Vesta: Now you’re all stuck here, including the saboteur. All of you. This place isn’t safe. 

Styx:

Vesta: I’m going to beam this up anyway, even though you’ve probably done it too. The more the merrier. Make no mistake, I’m betting this is directed at you. The blast is down by cabin V, but it took out more than that. If I were you, I’d be thinking seriously about jumping ship. You’ve been burnt, is what I’m reading this as. Jump ship, we get enough through traffic here. You can find another passage. 

Styx:

Vesta: I’ll hide you. There’s enough secure chambers here, airlocked, shielded. Just get back to me. Order an old fashioned at the refrect, and I’ll find you. 

Styx: 

There’s no response. She can feel her throat constricting. The back of her knuckles grates on the cold of the suit glove. She’s said what she’s come out here to say, and for the first time, she thinks about personal safety, hers. She’s out on the surface without a partner, as always, but that’s not safe if there’s a saboteur about, looking for people sending clandestine messages. Exactly as she’s doing. Now that she thinks about it, all the stars feel like eyes, pinpricks on her skin. She can’t remember if the shadow by the rock is new or was there when she came out, whether the satellite moving overhead is a friendly or a foe.

She can’t breathe properly until she’s inside the airlock. 

Back in the refrect, the people have thinned out, skating back to their holes, like frightened rabbits, exactly as she’s doing. Juan looks at her a little too often, like she knows there’s a story ready to burst from Ben if she’s pressed even just a little. Ben retreats to the kitchen, which has the advantage of food. Marcia’s resting against a wall, with the oxygen line in, and in no shape to ask questions, and food is forgotten for the moment. Her face is pale, and there’s crusts around her eyes, and her nose, and her mouth, but Marcia bats Ben’s hand away when she tries to wipe it off. Wheezing at her, rather than snapping, but that’s likely only because she can’t muster the breath. She grudgingly accepts a water bulb, and Marcia’s eyes drift closed momentarily. The ship breach suddenly seems a lot less important. Ben can hear the laboured breathing, hissing in and out, slowly, slower still, until it approaches as normal as it ever is, and she’s not going to disturb that. Her eyes still closed, Marcia pulls a cloth from her pocket, and wipes her face herself, and when she’s finished, and her eyes open, she’s shockingly normal, apart from being as pale as a ghost. 

“You shouldn’t be back here in that suit,” she says, and Ben’s back to being the child who can’t quite ever measure up, who doesn’t fit in, who doesn’t know what to do. “But if you carry the rack in for me, I’ll say no more about it.” Ben can see that Marcia’s stifling a cough, by the end of the second sentence. Rather than argue, and provoke another fit, she does what she’s told. There’s pastry, all flaky, and likely to crumb up the vents, and she’ll probably be told to clean them before the week’s out, but the smell of them makes it worthwhile. Cinnamon, whether synth, or the more precious bark from the seedlings, and vat meat, and garlicky, and she can’t remember if she ate before the blast. 

When she’s out of the kitchen, she steals one, slips it into the coverall pocket of her suit for later. Urtz is behind the bar, and her raised eyebrow tells Ben that she saw, but she won’t say anything. Ben slips the rack of food into the slot behind the bar, trying not to bash her helmet into the bulb rack, and not quite succeeding, but not spilling the bulbs over the room either, and it almost feels normal.  
Then she remembers the starburst of metal and the stars through it, and she’s not hungry anymore. Slips back out, and holds a bar stool. 

“Favour? If someone asks for an old fashioned, you tell them to find the Dog’s Breakfast. Don’t make a big deal, just say that the barkeep who knows the blend lives there. Okay? Give them a whiskey instead.”

Urtz cocks her head on one side, shaking her carefully blonded curls, and adjusts her jumpsuit for maximum effect. She eyes up Ben’s spacesuit in return. “A whiskey it is. You better scoot if you don’t want another lecture from the boss. You know how she is on suits behind the bar. Or on you in here in general. You’re either staff or you’re not.”

Ben does know. Juan’s feeling is about the same as Marcia feels about suits in the kitchen. Unhygienic, and bulky, and get that thing out of here. She does.

There’s still no one left in the corridors down to the port, stark contrast to the usual hustle, the kids under foot, the jumpsuited locals, the hardsuited visitors, everyone talking, everyone keen on the novelty only a new person can provide. Today, everyone must have scattered back to quarters, waiting for the all clear that no-one’s going to give. It’s so quiet that she can hear the echo of her boots, now that she’s helmetless. She’d been in such a hurry after exiting the Styx that she’d not taken her helmet off until she reached the refrect, after she’d sent the message. She’ll need to refill the tanks, before she takes any further excursions. After this one.

The Dog’s Breakfast is a small ship, but it’s all hers. It’s locked onto an outer tunnel, out of the way, bothering no one. There’s a note on the door, red and black and official, and the port authority’s been quicker than usual, it’s a warning that a stanchion’s been damaged in the central port, and that clearances for docking and departures might take a bit longer. Nothing about the blast. 

The outer lock has a trick to it, there’s a jiggle to the handle, and a judicious application of sideways force, and it’s open. She really should prioritise fixing the lock so that it opens more readily, particularly given current events, should she want to leave abruptly. The air smells tinny as she clambers through. She has arrangements for atmos, there’s a cable connecting the port atmos to the environmental control, detachable remotely, but the air always has a tinny smell to it until she’s been on board for a couple of hours. She dogs the hatch. Takes a deep breath. Lets it out slowly, and wills herself not to cry. She could just leave abruptly now. She’s stockpiled stores, bit by bit, like barnacles accreting over the years to a seafaring ship, and there’s enough there for months for one, if she’s careful. Her green room, her protein vat, is rudimentary. More like a green wall. More like a tub. Tamsin’s visited, of course, a number of times, and termed it ‘an exciting challenge’, but not once has volunteered to ship aboard with her. The Dog’s Breakfast is lacking in one particular respect that the Styx isn’t: and that would be Cantor. There’s enough room for a crew of eight, if they’re friendly. Was run with a crew of two, and a little girl. Would have worked, if the rest of space was populated by humans who were friendly. Which it wasn’t. Still isn’t. Leaving abruptly now though has the advantage of keeping her alive, if there’s a person wandering around with explosives, and a malicious approach to other persons sharing information. 

The Dog’s Breakfast forks off at a T junction to crew quarters, and flight deck, and environmentals. There’s a hatch to the engineering section, and it’s there that she takes herself, to sit, and potter with the engines, and think. She’s aware that the hermit crab approach won’t do for long. Someone’s going to come looking, and she needs to have a plan.  



	24. The way it happened goes like this (2)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There's more than one side to a story

He’d been shooed out of his quarters and he’d half welcomed it. They were barely his quarters anyway, and he was sharing them with a youngster, a half baked kid who wouldn’t stop singing, and happened to be the captain’s son, so couldn’t be told to shut it. He himself was no-one’s son, not now, with no one to tell him to shut it, so he didn’t either. He’d grabbed a jacket, because Vesta 4 was cold, he’d been told, but that was it. No hairbrush, no chance to look himself over in the mirror and see what being eighteen and an orphan got you, no nothing. Out on his arse and feeling sorry for himself, and that was going to get him precious little was his instinct. 

His first time portside since he’d boarded the Styx, a favour owed by someone to someone else to his dead mother. The last of the life rafts afforded him by the crew she’d belonged to, who’d patted him on the back, and staked him an outfit that wouldn’t get him mocked by his new crew, the ones who’d shown him what ropes they had on astrogating, helped him make sense of the gravitational embolism that had taken her too early, given him an extra detachable foot for good luck and downloaded his mother’s logs for him onto a memory stick before kicking him onto a new ship to make his own way. Two years ago, standard. He sometimes thought, waking aboard the Styx in the half dark of the cabin, that he was back on the Neptune’s Fancy, and lifted his comm to call his mother, see how her shift was shaping. He’d only actually done it the once, and the person who’d answered had been a bloke in engineering, who’d been gruff, and then hung up. 

In the lift going down to the airlock, there was a mirror. Looking himself over, he’d forgotten to shave, but it didn’t really matter. Not enough fluff to make it worth it, his mother would have said. Scruffy, his mother would also have said. He had her hair, brown curls that the crew patted every so often and a dimple in the right place in his cheek, and the scar on his eyebrow from the first time he’d landed badly from a space walk, two years ago, not long after she’d died, and although he reckoned he wasn’t as handsome as Cantor of the voice at midnight dark 20 was going to be, he hoped he was handsome enough for someone portside. Out to make friends or at least influence people into taking him seriously. 

Caught mid hair fluff by the doors opening and feeling the goose he was sure he looked. The crowd of crew members waiting patiently at the airlock for the final all clear, the seal to be released, an instant audience. Even better, Hay’s up the front with Cantor, a supervised portside visit for him, and hopefully out of earshot for Podraig.

“Anyone game to wish me luck? I’ve been two years on ship, and I may have forgotten how to behave with landlubbers.” He tucks his thumbs into his beltbuckle, in an imitation of an oldtimey cowboy, in one of the Earthside dramas.

Verde snorts. Salve takes the bait. “Alright. What makes you think you ever knew? Look at you, all fluffy like a baby in zero grav. As raw as meat in the vat. You come back and tell me that even one person gave you the time of day in the first place, and I’ll - ”

“Take my cleaning shifts for the next month? Done. Just make sure you scrub as hard as I do. Urine stains, you know. Actually, you would know, wouldn’t you? Your shirt needs a wash. Steady, steady. I’m just a raw recruit, as you’ve said. Let’s see how I do. And you have a nice time too.”

Verde holds Salve’s shoulder, and the shirt fabric bunches in his fingers. Salve’s a little man, but Verde isn’t, and Pod’s never fought anyone before and he’s not sure what the next move in the dance is, but he’s determined to learn. 

“Okay. Young fella, you’ve bitten off enough. Quit while you’re ahead. Salve’ll take your shifts if you find yourself a place to sleep in station tonight. Which is not going to happen because you’re as green as the day you were born, or the one before that. Mind though, Vestans don’t extend charity. They don’t give rescue. Pay for what you take and don’t sully the ship’s name with your doings. We’ll see you back on board in six hours standard. What you don’t see today, you can see tomorrow. We’ll be done by then, so make it good.” Verde turns, dismissing him.

The seal’s opening. 

“Any one else, any tips? What’s good on Vesta?” He’s serious. If he is going to be back on board in six hours, and this is his one shot for the foreseeable, he’ll have to be judicious with his time. He’s seen just about every square inch of the Styx, several million times. He’s counted the ceiling tiles in his cabin so many times he uses them as a memory aid, four left and thirteen down gives you the grav pull of the asteroids in quadrant sixty five. A boy’s got to do something with his spare time, after all, and he can only read the Decameron so many times before it becomes uncomfortable.

Frieda, his immediate superior, turns back from the crowd, shaking her shaggy grey hair at him. Her eyes crinkle up though, and it’s not a reprimand. She’s spruced up her usual outfit of comfortable grey or tan shirts and comfortable slacks with a scarf that floats about her neck, all red and black threaded through her hair, and she has makeup on, eyes that glow and lips that blush, and he’s halfway to a crush, despite the fifty year age gap, and best time to hop off the ship for at least six hours in any case before it gets any worse.

“You can’t miss their green space, it’s wild. There’s a fig tree that’s full size. Wheat fields, I mean proper fields. Ucombine’s done wonders. It was raw cold rock when they started whenever ago that was, and now it’s a proper garden. Bathe your eyeballs in that instead of the black for a change, and I damn well guarantee you’ll make it good. Forget all that shirtfronting you’re doing with Salve, for what I don’t damn well know. Spend your time on something you’ll be happy to remember. Oh, and try the refrect. Can’t miss it, it’s the only one, bar the little hole in the wall in the dock. The daughter of the owners is something of a genius, she’s spliced cinnamon into some hardy enough root stock, and that’s just the start. The refrect get first dib on anything which adds to taste, and they use it. We’ll be buying some, Verde always makes sure we do, but it’s not the same when it’s anyone but Marcia cooking it. If you don’t have enough credits to eat there, which you should, I’ll stake you. It’s worth it.”

There’s a rush of station air inflowing, and a high pitched whistle, which fades away even before he finishes noticing it. 

The crowd starts to thin, but Frieda holds back. Holds him steady with her eyes until the crowd’s gone, and it’s just the two of them, and the port door open, waiting. 

“Don’t you go looking for trouble. Or any person in particular. Still my risk. Hear me, Pod?” She’s serious now, and the eyes aren’t crinkling, they’re trained on him like a laser sight.

“I wouldn’t. I know better, I swear. I won’t.”

She looks at him, one long last look. Nods, and turns. Then it’s just him and the promise of the open door.

He doesn’t quite stumble on the rough surface, but it’s not as easy footing as the metal corridor of the Styx. The air is chill, colder than he’d expected, and he hasn’t put his gloves on, stupidly, and he fumbles at them until his fingers are marginally less chilled. Even with the gloves, when he reaches a hand out to the rock walls, he can feel the heat leaching out, and he snatches his hand back. Think first, his mother would have said. Thinking hadn’t helped her.

There’s a train station, and the time left on the countdown is less than 5 minutes, so he stands at the station and waits. It’s a barren tunnel, no placards, no advertising materials. One noticeboard, with notes overlaid with other notes, and fragments remaining from ones blown away. The notes mainly relate to the lost, but Vesta appears to have an underground poet, poems in between the lost property. It could be their contact. He can’t tell. Some of the poems are good. Some aren’t, or are so good that he can’t tell the difference. 

The train, when it comes, is practically empty, and he’s free to roam. There’s a gym, and as the train really picks up speed, and he feels the grav, Vestans that he doesn’t recognise fill the room, resistance bands and rowing machines the order of the day. Virtuous, and it doesn’t scratch his itch. There are sleeping compartments, bunks with curtains, and precious little privacy, less even than aboard the Styx. In a pinch, this’ll do. It’ll shut Salve up. And then he’s at the end of the train. He expects a window, but there’s only a tiny one in a door at the end, and there’s no light in the tunnel, they speed in the dark.

The green space is spectacular. It’s like walking into an actual garden, not another burrowed out room, except that the sky’s not blue, and it’s held in by a geodesic dome against the black, and he decides not to look up if he can help it. True to Frieda’s word, there is indeed a giant tree in the middle, although he wouldn’t have known it was a fig without the warning, with its multiple trunks, and surface growing roots that a pair of sleeping bunks could fit between. He feels an urge to climb it, and he’s a hand on the roots growing down to give himself the tug up he needs, when there’s a cough behind him. It’s an old chap, with a hoe as a crutch, or a weapon against marauding spacemen, and he thinks better of his impulse. 

“Quite some tree,” he remarks, but the fellow moves on, disappearing into the field of tall grass. Wheat? He wouldn’t know. The nook between the roots proves a perfect spot to sit and look out across the field, and he gives Frieda’s recommendation a good ten minutes by his count, although it’s five by his watch. There’s no wind to stir the grass, except where the fellow moves, and it’s like watching a very slow moving ship. It’s not restful, and it’s not scratching his itch. He pats the tree when he leaves.

This time when he boards the train, he goes to the front, hoping to see the station come into view, but it’s almost as dark as the rest of the tunnel until the brakes come on. There’s a painting at this one, not a noticeboard. It’s not great, but it’s not bad, and it has the merit of being something he hasn’t had to look at, and look at again, and look at over and again because there’s nothing else to look at on board that isn’t something he’s looked at a million times over. It’s a landscape of, presumably, the Vestan surface, with pinpricks through it that allow the white of the rockwall behind to shine through in the place of stars. He spends a minute bemused by this, before he touches it and verifies that they are in fact holes, and not little glowing lights. Someone’s clever.

There’s music coming from down the corridor, someone on a stringed instrument, and someone else on a pipe, and a childish treble that can only mean that Hay and Cantor have found their home away from home. The Captain had mentioned that she had a connection, but he hadn’t expected the music. Cantor’s not bad, measured objectively. Subjectively, he sings too much in their cabin, and Podraig’s half of a mind to leave, until he takes in the room of people that he doesn’t know. A room full of miners and mechanics, workers all and all of them new. 

The night unfolds in the usual manner as nights often do when the person’s young enough to be foolish, and has enough credits to be foolish with. Podraig was full of surprised delight as it did. It transpires that when he’s given enough leeway at the Captain’s table, he can actually make her laugh, laugh so hard that she snorts her whisky up her nose, which makes Cantor giggle like the child he really is, despite that he’s trying to play the big fellow for her across the table there, the young Tamsin, all long hands and delicate featured like an elf, but tall like one that’s grown with her trees, the one responsible for the spices. And such spices they are, at least when eating at the captain’s table, a rich dish with layers of vat meat, and eggplants, and stretching protein that’s both sweet and hot in the mouth, and finishes with a tang, and another with beans that are full of crunch and salt and numbing bite, nothing like the bland meals that the ship’s kitchen serves up. No, those are built precisely to recipe, to body weight and nutrient requirements, and stores available, and work output likely projections, and they taste like it too. He’s half a mind to see if he can buy his own stock of whatever spices these are, and tells the table that. Hay laughs. He’s not been paid that much, and he knows it. He wanted the laugh. The laugh’s worth it. The lady of the refrect, Juanita, all brown curls and sparkling conversation, sitting aside Hay like an old friend, and for all he knows they are, rubs his hair, and calls him ambitious, and if ever he wants to take a turn in her wife’s kitchen, he’s more than welcome, and the warmth blossoms up from his stomach, and there’s at least one person who approves of him on Vesta, and he likes it. 

The conversation drifts, and Hay turns her attention to Cantor and Tamsin, interweaving their stories about the green space, and the ways in which the dome’s been patched, and the very technical words coming out of the childish Tamsin’s mouth should be more jarring than it is, but his interest wanders. Verde is in an intense discussion over at the wall, but Pod can feel his eyes every now and again, like a spark jumping out of a fire, and he needs to move on, or lose the wager.

The spices linger in the lining of his cheek, and flavour his drink, a cordial notion water blend, all he’s drunk so far, and he’s old enough now to think about other drinks he might try. After all, he does have the credits for that, if not enough for the spice. Who knows how the night might unfold if he tries that, after all, is anyone’s guess. There’s little enough alcohol on the ship, their green room is not that extensive, and there’s a tacit understanding between Hay and the crew that station side is the time for letting loose, on board is the time to be straight. Having said that, Verde has a black market vodka he distils in his quarters, which Pod’s pretty certain that Hay knows about, but tolerates because it’s small, and Pod’s tried that, and only thrown up once, so it’s a thing that he’s willing to try again, with more of a captain’s blessing. Here, he’s pretty certain that if they can make food like that, they can do better than vodka with an edge of danger. He’s hopeful, as he hooks his feet into a stool, and then he sees her. 

She’s not as tall as some of the other Vestans, shorter than he is. She’s tossing bulbs around with gay abandon, from stock to hand, from hand to hand, and anchoring them to the bar, with a slide to each patron that looks like magic, and he suspects owes something to magnets. The empty ones she juggles like she’s plucking eggs from thin air, playing with air currents, and bewitching them into the line she wants, from her hands, to the air to the refrect disinfecting bin. She’s joking with the customers, light and easy, with eyes that remind him of Juanita’s, all mischief until they’re not, when she turns to the disinfecting bin, all business as she programs the system, and it whirs into action, and then back to the charm, as she pulls another one out of nowhere, and assembles a basket’s full for another serving person. He’s staring, he realises, and looks down at the bar, and watches her reflection approach.

“What would you suggest a complete neophyte try first? You’ve such a range of things, I’m quite overwhelmed. The Styx has a large sample set of three different options, and my tastebuds are already in a state of nervous shock. I need a drink. They need a drink. We all do. Take pity on a poor lost Styx man and give me what you’d give yourself after a long hard day. In fact, give me a double and I’ll shout you one as well.” He talks too much when he’s nervous, he’s been told. 

She smiles, but she doesn’t talk. Holds up a credit reader, and apparently what she likes to drink isn’t expensive, or if it is, she’s charging him with the staff discount. He fumbles with his comm, and taps the reader before he drops the comm onto the bar, clattering, discordant, and he half expects, when he looks up, for Verde to be there all mocking, and superior, but when he looks, Verde’s still across the room, with no more than the usual amount of superiority, and he breathes back out. She’s not mocking, or superior, she’s continuing on with the making, and there’s something complicated she’s doing with the dispensing system, liquid into a bulb, and then another, the bubbles rising up from the sides as it settles in, the bulb frosting as it does. The drink’s as brown as her eyes, he notes, as she slides it across the bar, stopping neatly at his hand. She dispenses another, and holds it up, waiting.

“To my tastebuds. Long may they live and prosper.”

She still doesn’t talk. 

He takes an exploratory sip. There’s fire burning at the back of his throat, and up into his nostrils and the back of his ears, ginger and pepper, and chilli, and a citrus that replaces it, and finally an oakiness that liners. He’s no idea what he’s drinking. He’s no idea what he’s doing, and he goes to tell her that, but his throat won’t let him talk. She’s not just smiling, she’s looking amused, beyond amused into something else, and she’s downed the drink, and there are other customers to serve and she moves on, and out of his orbit, but not out of his sight. 

He’s still his drink to finish, is his excuse. She makes him another, when he finishes that, and his head is a little blurry when she leans over to hand him this one. She has hands that have scars, and are rough when they touch his. His are smooth, and he has none. Her fingers curve like they’re trying to hold on, and his mind promptly produce an image of them curving around his, the way they’d feel around his biceps, and then she takes her hand back, and it’s gone.

He tries not to keep staring at her, while she’s serving the rest of the Styx. Tries and fails. She makes a round of beers for some of their ice miners, and laughs with them when the bubbles come out of their nose, tells them that it’ll help with buoyancy, and wipes the bartop clean, no hard feelings. She’s laughing with them, not at them. She’s kind.

She serves a round of vodka bulbs to Verde, who has marched, one careful foot after another, death approaching, and does it completely blank faced, no charm, no superior face that he could take offence at, credit reader beeped off, and Verde gone without trouble. She’s wise.

He watches her with the other serving staff. There’s a busty one who’s dressed in skimpier clothing than anyone wears on the Styx, and a bloke with an unbuttoned shirt, and one who dresses so as to not reveal anything, plain coverall from top of their head, to the bottom of their feet, and gives nothing away as they walk, and all of them get a twinkle of the eye from his waitress, and a pat on the hand, as she sends them off and away, as they skirt the room. She’s friendly.

When she leans over the bar, the edge of her shirt comes away, and he can almost see what colour she’s wearing underneath. Almost, but not quite. He looks away before she turns back. He can see the muscles in her forearms, and they’re better defined than his. She can’t work in the bar all the time. He wants to feel how strong she actually is, feel her arms around him. He can’t remember, as he lets the ginger burn in his mouth again, the last time anyone touched him. Perhaps Hay’s laid a gentle hand on his shoulder after a shift. A tap on the back, to signify good work. He’s had a practice bout or two with Salve, and the others, down in the gym, but being punched in the gut isn’t the same as a pretty woman’s arm about you, or so he imagines. She’s oh so very real.

Hay’s escorting Cantor out, he notices, and he can see her scan the room, looking her crew over, picking Kim out by eye, who taps out of the poker game in the corner, and starts the process of exiting. Tamsin’s back behind the counter, too young to drink, but not too young to serve under the watchful eyes of her mothers, and she’s very definitely and very classically pretty. She’s the curls, and the cascading hair, and the delicate limbs, and elf like features that most of the Vestans boast, and the light brown skin all of them have that glows, even out here, even without the sunshine down in the depths of the refrect. His waitress keeps her hair short, and tucked back behind her ears, which are rounded. She has a scar on her cheek down one side and another on her chin, he notes, as she talks to Tamsin quietly, and directs her back into the kitchen. It’s a small one on her chin, just on the tip of her chin. Perhaps she fell into the front of her helmet, hard. She’s also some burst blood vessels on her cheeks, he can see the red dots, and that’s from a long time in a suit, without checking pressurisation. So she’s not perfect.

Verde’s left, some point between his third and his fourth drinks. He’s free to go, and hole up away from the judging eyes, and fake winning of his bet. It’s past midnight now, and he can feel it in the muscles of his legs, ready to admit defeat and lie down, and remove the prosthetic. He can feel it in the buzzing of his blood, with whatever it was that she served him. He doesn’t know what to say to her, how to make the night unfold in the way that he’d really like it to. He’s never done this before. He really wants to know what she tastes like. He could claim that there was something in the drink that was making him think those things, more graphic ideas about her hands, and parts of his body, about the sudden need to bite the crook of her neck just under the orange jumpsuit, but he knows he'd be lying. Besides, it’s all academic, because the lights are flashing, and turning up, and he needs to go find that bolthole again, the bunk on the train, or at a pinch, the space between the roots of that one big tree. After perhaps one last look, because after tonight, he’ll be a long time back on Styx, and he knows by heart every last face on that ship and there’s no one as interesting looking as she is. Brown eyes, and scarred cheek and chin and all, but when he looks to where she last was, she’s not there, and there’s a sink in his stomach, a gap where his courage had been, and he goes to turn around, and she’s there. He’s never done this before.


	25. Picking the lock and threading the needle

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After any violent act, there's a wave that develops out of the chaos and confusion. The trick is learning how to ride it.

The station’s chaos immediately after he feels the thump, it’s like an ant’s nest in a thunderstorm. He’d have thought that Vesta would be more organised than this. More precision drills, more orderly evacuations, sealing up of tunnels, roll calls, ward captains, more like the Styx, but perhaps Verde was right, perhaps they were nothing more than station rats with no thought for their own, and a care only for their own skins, such as they were. He’s in a tunnel near the surface, he thinks, and nothing seals off at all, and he can’t tell if there’s been an impact on the surface and he should head in, or an impact at the port, and he should head out. He heads to the port, because that’s where the Styx is, and where he should be, if there’s something happening to Vesta, it’s his ticket offworld. And if something’s happening to the Styx, it’s best he know about it. And yet.

If there’s something happening to the Styx, the best place to be might be far far away. If he’s right in his guess, and there’s another hole in the Styx courtesy of the same someone who caused the last one, then safer off than in. Or worse, it could be the work of someone on the station. They could be working together. It could be a whole conspiracy. In which case, nowhere’s safe, surely? He’s halfway down the corridor, and there’s a door, which he takes, and another, and another, and finds himself in a twisty maze of passages, all alike, all cold, and all quiet. He can hear the sound of his own breathing in the helmet, and he forces himself to slow it down, one hand on the wall to brace, and the pulse of his blood throbbing in his stump. No good will come of being as paranoid as Verde. As foolhardy as Salve. As quick to jump. In the dark, the only light’s coming from his helmet, and it plays across the rough surfaces. So rough that this must be one of the older tunnels, less used, less safe. If he was game enough to take his helmet off, it’d be musty dirt that he smells, he bets, but there’s no point. He’s plenty of air left in the tank, he can see, and playing it safe when there’s detonations happening elsewhere is a good bet. 

Playing the light across the surface, he tries to find the door out. He finds an original seal, and he can’t remember whether in his panic he opened and closed this one, or if it’s new, and in the absence of any other indicators, he determines to go on. 

It opens readily to his hand, in contrast to many of the other Vestan doors he’s encountered over the last weeks of solo exploration, in the absence of any other entertainment, and his semi exclusion from the refrect, self imposed. This one must have been treated, used regularly, cared for. Probably something to be cautious about, probably something worth exploring through the door. Possibly. 

The door opens onto a narrow tunnel heading up, with no atmos that he can determine, and the last chamber must have been an airlock of sorts, from a much earlier time, when Vestans cared less about signage. He finds himself, once he clumsily scrambles up, stump bumping on his prosthetic as he makes the final ascent, on the surface. It’s sudden, and his helmet immediately dims, ever protective against the unshielded sunlight, the reflected beams from the other asteroids, the glaring planets hanging out there, all too bright. When he opens his eyes again, he’s in a crater wall, and from where he stands, he can see endless dark, and down the crater a bit, there’s a very much human comm stand, tilted towards a particular angle. There’s signs on the surface of boots in the dust, a groove, once he’s stumbled his way towards the spot, that perfectly fits a suitarm. There’s a clumsy pictograph of a tree, with white rocks in the place of, so he imagines the creator intended, leaves. It looks childish, and he can’t imagine anyone taking the time to do it, if they weren’t stuck out here for other purposes. A waste of precious Vestan atmos, and these aren’t a people to do that. 

There’s a silence in his ears, and he doesn’t know whether he’s safe out here. Whoever created this, left their comms here, they might be back at any moment, and they might be as on edge as he is. And yet.

He’s a duty to himself, to his second job, to be curious. That curiosity finds him his contact’s setup, the metal comm and tripod glinting against the dirt.

He pushes gently off the crater wall, and drifts in a kangaroo hop towards the comm, dust puffing up as he lands, trying not to touch the comm, trying not to change the angle.

He bends, lining his eyesight up with the comm. Whoever used this must have been shorter than him, and a bit of an anomaly amongst the Vestans, who tend to tall. It’s trained towards, and he pulls out his comm, flicks over to the mapping to be sure, the port. He steps back, and looks up, to be sure, scanning the sky, and once his view stabilises, he can see it, there’s a repeater satellite on a synch orbit, and he’d bet there’s one further out. One last thing to check. 

He puts his hand to the comm, hoping that the last use had been a hasty one and the screen’s been left unlocked.

It hasn’t. The last user prized caution over speed. There’s a command prompt flicking, but he’s not game to tamper. If the last user prized caution, this could have a failsafe built in that will take his hand, or at the least, flick them a warning, and he’s on his own.

He pulls up his own comms, and flicks it to the secure channel that he uses to send messages to his Styx contact. Just to see. 

There’s a stream of messages from whomever to him. He’d say that they’re panicking, but he’s still taking it in. It was the Styx, and it was HE, and it was by his cabin. His and Cantor’s and if he’d been on board, he’d be gone. If he’d slept aboard, he’d be bits and pieces floating in the black. Cantor could have been onboard, moving his effects down to the married quarters in prep for Tamsin. Someone he knows has done this, on purpose, to try to kill one of them. 

His hands, he notes, are shaking in the suit, and it feels like his suit’s heat system has shut down, flicked a switch, he shouldn’t be this cold, not even on the surface. 

It’s a messy way to try to kill someone. It’s overkill. Whoever did this hated him, hated the ship that much that they’d try to take it out, even if they were found. 

There’s a sea of names floating in front of him, a sea of faces, indiscriminate in their appearance, there’s Hay, and the miners, and Juanita of the refrect, and there’s Cantor, and Tam, and Ben, and it could be any of them. Nowhere’s safe. Everywhere’s full of risk, as empty as the space that surrounds him. Great.

The only person he can think to trust, the only lifeline to grab is the one his comm is showing. It’s back to the refrect.

The passages are no less twisty on the way back, but he takes them with more care. His stump is throbbing now, and he would give his other foot to be able to sit down for a spell, but there’s no time, not really. The passages are less crowded, too. People have found their boltholes, or rushed to the scene of the crime to give aid or gawk, and he’s virtually the only mover. He opens his helmet once he nears the refrect, not having been game any further out. The carved doors on the residences are all tightly fastened, and there’s a steady breeze, and he can’t tell if the port’s sealed anymore, but there’s air enough to breathe, although it smells more mineral than before, which can’t be good.

The refrect is full. There’s more people in here than any other time he’s visited, and all the wait staff are serving bulb after bulb. There’s a mix of Vestans and shipboard, although he can’t see Hay. There’s no Cantor and no Tamsin, and the absence of Ben isn’t in this instance soothing. Verde is in a corner, too loud to ignore.

“I tell you, it was one of you who did it. One of your own, Vesta. You’ve marooned us here, and for why? You’ve never liked us, have you, us Earth born. Us Earth loyal, I should say. You want us gone. You want us all dead and gone. Find me the person who did this, or I swear, I’ll have the lot of you. I’ll break this station to the black. I can do it, you know, don’t think I can’t. Earth has ways of dealing with you, and it wouldn’t take much, you pack of cowards. One good rock would do.”

He weaves his way through the people watching, any of whom, he’s keenly aware, could be holding a knife. A gun. A rock, even. The voice follows.

“We know, oh yes, we know. When was the last time you paid anything like your share back to Earth? It cost billions to get you up here, and all you can think about is your sorry hides.”

The crowd shifts, closing the path behind him to the door. He can feel the imaginary knives.

Urtz locks eyes with him. She’s shuttered her face, and all the usual come hither has been turned off. He’d bet there’s a button somewhere that floods the room with nitrous, or turns down the O2, and he’d bet that all the waitstaff are fingers ready to do it, should Verde whip up the crowd any further.

He clears his throat. Bridges about to be burned.

“Old fashioned, please”. Dies are cast. 

He can feel the crowd shifting behind him. 

“Where’s that girl? That Tamsin. She was onboard when she had no reason to be, right?” Verde is practically shouting now, spittle flying. “You find me that girl, and I’ll bet she’s the one. I’ll space her, I swear. That’s what you folk do to lawbreakers, right? I’ll do it to her. I swear. Find me the girl or I’ll see to it that you’re cut off, all of you, from the Earth trade. I can do it. I will do it. Trust me for that.”  
Urtz has gone rigid. Juanita’s appeared from the back room, flanked by Marcia, oxygen mask on and appearances be damned. Ned’s summoned up a bat from somewhere.

“You will leave this place, immediately.” He’s never heard Juanita sound like that before, deep throated and wolflike. “You take your crew, and find somewhere else to spit your poison. Leave before I make you do it. Trust me for that.”

Urtz pushes a bulb into his hand. “You should go. No charge.” 

He can feel a paper in his hand around the bulb. He can’t look at it now, surrounded by hostile eyes, and he can’t think in the din. He turns, and he can see the crowd shifting, but no one’s left the room yet, and there’s no indication that they’re going to. Someone has to do something. There’s no other officer present excepting Verde and Salve, and the fight is what they’re looking for. The fight that he doesn’t want. It’s on him. He breathes out and pitches low, and loud, and steady as he can.

“Styx people, let’s go. Find yourself a place on the sleep train for now, if you don’t have a friend who’ll put you up. We’re going to need to do some repairs, and if I know Vestans, they’re itching to give us a quote. Let’s make it easy for them, instead of hard. I know Hay’s got credits and to spare, but she won’t thank you for adding to the bill by damaging this place, and I won’t thank you because this place has some of my favourite food in the universe. You’ve all tried the fare, now let’s leave the faremakers alone. Babyface Sue, show them the way, you’re closest to the door?”

He tries not to let the relief out, as she leaves, and takes a cluster with her. 

There’s still enough of the ice miners left that he can’t.

“Kwan, I’d personally appreciate your assistance here. I’ve seen you down enough of the beers at this place to know that you love it as much as I do. Juanita can’t make the beers if her place is the site of the next bombing. No one wants there to be less beer on Vesta, do they?”

“It’s your shout next shift, then boyo,” Kwan calls, but he’s already standing, and he and his crew are out the door before Verde can whip them up, and with his crew of the bigger and brawnier frames gone, there’s less risk of a mass to riot, and Pod can feel Verde seething. 

With Kwan out, there’s a slow trickle of people who drift doorwise, and out, not so quickly to make it look like they’re obeying Juan, or Pod, or doing anything other than what they’ve chosen to do for their own particular reasons at this point in time, independent folk that they are. 

He chances a sip of the drink, and there’s a double shot of whisky in there, and it takes his voice away. He can see through the bulb to the writing now, crumpled and refracted through the plasglass. The Dog’s Breakfast. He needs to get to the port.

The bulb’s empty, and his hands are warm. He disposes of the bulb, and the paper coating into the recyc bin himself. 

By the door, Verde holds his shoulder. “You watch yourself, boyo. I’m watching you. You’ve always had a thing about Vesta, even after what that bitch did to you. I’m watching you real close.”

He shakes free. “I’m a very attractive man. I wouldn’t be surprised if you weren’t the only one. Now you’ll have to excuse me, I’m taking my own advice, and I’d be glad if you did the same. I’m hoping for a bit of calm while we sort this out. Hay won’t thank you for adding to the chaos.”

Verde spits. “Fuck Hay. If the ship’s gone. I don’t have to put up with her. Never liked her anyway.”

He wishes he could slam the door in Verde’s face, but there’s a safety delay, and he’s trying to calm, not rile. The port is where he needs to be, not the brig, but that’s a thing he’s noted about Vesta.   
There’s no brig here. Once is warned, twice is spaced. The port, then. He wonders where Tamsin is.


	26. At the bottom of a goldfish bowl

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Masks off

She’s checked her list more than twice, and she’s as ready as she’s ever going to be. The oxygen levels all read nominal, and the scrubber’s working fine, that’s equipment she knows like the back of her hand, better. She can breathe easy here, for months, years even, if it’s just her. If she doesn’t go crazy first. 

There’s enough fuel in the regen to keep her out for months, if she’s careful. How would she know if she’s careful in real life? She’s never flown in actual, only in sim. In sim she’s golden, but in sim she doesn’t have a vengeful someone with HE and bad intentions on her tail. Or so it feels. The sim in the refrect and the sim in the port don’t feel exactly the same way as the controls in the Dog’s Breakfast feel in her hand. She’s never actually taken it out for a spin solo. She was meaning to ask Cantor if he’d fancy taking it out with her, with Tamsin, of course, but then there hadn’t been a right moment, and now it was too late. Probably.

Then there’s the food. She’d meant to secrete (with Tamsin’s help, of course), some spice seedlings, and spice stores, against the endless bland of the limited green wall and fungus, and she’d none. She’d always thought she’d have more time. She’d thought she’d done so well, with the stores that she’d taken, but looking now in the harsh light of having to eat that, and only that, she knows that she really hasn’t. 

Then there’s the company. The lack of. She knows that she’s a quasi people person. She likes to talk, and hear the chaos that ensues. Talking to herself, she finds, makes for known responses. She likes the element of random that comes with interaction. There’ll be none of that. There are studies, she’s been told, though not read herself, about just how short a time it takes some people to go absolutely ass over teakettle in the black on their own, and she really hadn’t thought that she’d have to test herself on that particular hurdle. She likes to talk, and she values her sanity. Vesta suits her. Had suited her. 

She’s going to give it until 10pm standard. If her Styx contact finds her before then, all well and good. Perhaps they’ll be decent company, but they’ll be company one way or another, until she figures out where to next. 

She’s not changed out of her suit yet, and she’s her helmet in arms reach. She’s vulnerable here, she knows, linked to the port as she is. Not that the black is much safer, but the space pirates, or whatevers, that took a bite out of the Styx aren’t probably around still, or they’d have made themselves known. She’ll be safe enough for a little while, and the Dog’s Breakfast isn’t a ship that looks tasty enough to bother with, no hold for ice, or minerals, the Dog’s Breakfast is a ship that goes places fast, to deliver messages or people who don’t mind a limited diet, and such a ship can slip through holes in a net. Provided you have a decent pilot. She’s still stuck on that point. She’s a can do pilot and she’ll have to be a will do pilot, for there’s no one else to take the helm.

She hasn’t said goodbye to her aunts. Or Tamsin. That bit’s like an ulcer in her mouth. She hates the thought that she’ll be blamed for the HE, that her aunts, that Tamsin will believe it. She keeps poking at it, at the hope that they’ll know better, that she’s run because she’s always believed in getting out on the front foot, and that it doesn’t mean that she’s done it. She can see the story being shaped though, that as one of the crew working on it, she knew only too well where the Styx was vulnerable, that mid cabin point where it had been hit before, as a spy, and she uses that ugly word deliberately, for the adrenaline rush that she’s needing now to stay awake, as a Belt spy, she would have a keen interest in disrupting trade on a neutral ship like the Styx, for her own ends, and as a person who’s always played herself as being the smart one, wouldn’t the Vestans love the chance to prove her wrong for once. No, she’d be spaced before there’d be time to talk. She needs to go. 10 standard.  
She dozes in the chair, she’s made it too comfortable for sure. It’s been a long day, and she’d already been pushing the limits on the repair jobs. It’s with a start she wakes, when there’s a sound echoing down the corridor. Not a percussive sound of someone laying HE, not a far off sound of another blast on the surface, or on the Styx again, but the sound of someone trying to knock, like she’s in a cottage in the woods. Grandma ready to receive little Red Riding Hood.

Her neck has a crick in it, and there’s a pop as she shakes herself up and out of the chair. Her suit is sticking to her now, these things aren’t meant to be worn this long unless you have to, and hers has never been great at the wicking. She’s going to stink, unless she takes this one off soon, and airs it. Great way to meet a potential new crewmate. Except it’s not really a new crewmate, she’s known this person, whoever it is, for years. Literally for years. Correction, she knows the way in which they’ve chosen to present themselves. Funny. Nimble tongued, so to speak. Capable of being calm under pressure. Smart, almost as smart as her, she’s willing to concede, and of course, more widely travelled. Desperately sweaty and panicked wasn’t the way in which she wanted to meet any of her contacts, and especially not this one. It’s 9 standard, and she should be clean and fresh and behind the refrect, or stashed safely in a bunk in the sleep train, but she’s not, she’s here undoing the hatch and telling her stomach to stop turning over with hope, that it’s just as likely to be the port authorities with an update on the stanchion situation, or a lynch mob here to pull the hermit crab out of her shell. 

She’s about finished telling herself off when she finishes with the hatch. Then her stomach turns over again. It wasn’t supposed to be him and yet, when she thinks on it, there’s really no other person who it could have been. Inevitable, but that doesn’t mean she has to like it. She lets the hatch swing open, and watches him step through.


	27. Burn your bridges while you can

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sometimes all you can do is do the next thing

Their words collide mid air, like overlapping orbits.

“I ordered the drink and it was whisky. Some kind of joke, Vesta. Real funny.”

“When I offered up refuge, it wasn’t for you. That’s the last drink you’re getting from me.”

Then there’s silence. He can hear his breathing echo in the helmet. Hers is off.

“Space me, or shut the hatch. But do it quick.” He waits.

She rolls her eyes. They’re exactly as exasperated as he feels. She steps back, and he steps forward.

“Shut it yourself, you’re closer.” 

He wants to argue, but unfortunately, she’s right. It jams as he turns it, and he has to brace himself a minute. When he turns back, she’s exiting, and he follows. 

The ship’s small, and he has to dodge handstraps, taking one in the face as he clicks his helmet off, but she doesn’t. There’s a T junction and she turns right, a small cabin, two seater. There’s a small window out, facing the port. He can see the Styx, and its rupture, stomach splayed to the world, and scrapping out a stanchion with it, and it’s like a physical blow. He sits, and the chair creaks, lurching to one side. The helmet sits on his lap, like a handbag.

She stands. “I wasn’t exactly expecting company. I wasn’t expecting you. I wasn’t expecting, well,” and her hand encompasses the port, “this. Any of this. Thoughts?”

“Thoughts? Thoughts? Pause for a second, Vesta. Are you giving me refuge or are you not? Or did your offer of a bolthole encompass the universe of people only who aren’t me?”

She’s looking at the port still, and the open side of the Styx. He’s trying not to get caught up on the fact that it’s her, but it’s a material factor in how he plays this. He doesn’t even have an end game thought through yet, and Frieda would have been disappointed. Always think three steps ahead, but someone’s taken the board and snapped it in two, and his bolthole is the girl, the only girl, who’s ever made him feel less than worth it, no matter what Cantor said about her feelings for him. Perfect. There’s no time for this.

“Stow the helmet. You’re safe here, even if it’s you. Now. Forget that it’s me, and tell me what you’re thinking. It’s one of your crew, right? Who would it be, and how would they escalate?”

There’s a face in front of him, and it’s a scrunched up angry bitter man spitting flecks that float in Vestan low grav, he can blow them back into his face if he dares. Or is that too obvious? 

“What if it’s one of yours, then? Someone on Vesta who’s been on board? Let’s get it out of the way, I know it wasn’t me.”

“I just spent weeks fixing the damn boat. I thought you were smarter than that. If I was the girl you played the fool with all those years ago, I’d kick you out again, but I, at least, have grown up. Ask me any more questions like that, and I’ll regress.”

The chair needs a bit of work, he notes, as he pushes back in it, away from her. “You should know that Styx people are saying things. About five minutes away from spacing Tamsin earlier, before I de-escalated it. Yes, me, dumb as I am. One of my many talents, none of which are known to you, harpy. Now. Do you want to do something about any of that, or are we preserving our hides and running?”

He can see her knuckles white on the other chair. “Tamsin? How the hell would they even jump to that? Are you staying or are we going?”

He’s already picking up the helmet. 

“Going. Of course. Who the hell do you think I am? That’s my ship out there, and my best mate’s girl. You don’t know me at all. Tell me why you’re cowering in here then. Hypocrite.”

There’s a pause, and he can see the red flushing up her neck, hear the intake of breath. And he doesn’t stay to hear it. Or he wouldn’t if he could remember the way back to the hatch. For someone who’s a nav officer, he’s a shocker for twisty turning passages like these, and he finds himself in the littlest of dorms he’s ever seen. Like a little snug cave. He can’t immediately see the bedding, but what he can see are drawings on the walls, small on one side, tiny people, and trees, and stars, and a stylised solar system, and then higher, more complex drawings, all childishness gone, schematics and cutaways, and he can recognise the outline of the ship that he’s in. He can see a vine, twisting and turning all about the room, and it’s not very good, but it makes him think of vanilla, and pepper, and he half thinks he can smell it, but the scent’s behind him, and he should have been prepared for the shove in the back, but he’s not.

He's face first into a wall, that gives way into a sleeping sack. Mouthful of fabric, and his hands can’t quite get a grip, pushing into the gel of the sleeping pad. 

“Get the hell off me, I’m trying to get out.”

He can hear her breathing hard on the back of his neck, and her body kneeling on his lower back, and metal on his throat, she has a knife. She has a knife, and it’s sharp against him. He’s unsure which version of her he’s going to find if he turns around, and he pushes hard into the gel, trying to anchor. 

“I didn’t ask you in here, you know,” she says finally, as she pushes him down, and leverages off, and his body is free and the knife gone and he’s obscurely disappointed. “You’re here because if your cover’s blown, then mine is too. You’re not invited to my bed, and I’d thank you to - ”

“Fine, I’m getting out. Leave it,” He’s twisted about by this time, but the sleeping sacks wound around his legs, warm and soft and for all the world like a tentacle in its tenacity, its refusal to let go. 

“You bloody leave it. I should have known it was a mistake, inviting you in.”

“Can we just table all of that? Kill me after if you need it. Or take me if your offer’s still good.”

“I’m getting Tamsin, and we’re getting gone. Tamsin and me.” She pauses, swallows. “And you, I guess. I guess that still stands. I don’t go back on my word.” 

“Can’t take Tamsin without Cantor. I don’t know if Cantor’s up for it.” He pauses to finish unwinding the fabric, caught on his boot. “Have to leave that to her, I guess.” 

“Then I’ll need more stores, he eats enough for two. Stores and she’s going to want her splices. That’s going to take the better part of two hours. Fuck.”

It’s too long. If there’s really someone on Vesta, on Styx, who’s targeting him, two hours is a lifetime and gone. Still. There’s no other ship. There’s no other exit. This is the only lifeline he has. His foot is free. Ideally, if he were transferring ship, if he were shipping off to Vesta, he’d have all his personal effects, his second prosthetic, his nav charts and records, the contents of his personal locker, all of his things shipped aboard. They’re in a storage facility in the port, or had been, waiting for the repairs to finish. He could get them. If he was feeling more confident.

“Benita. Ben. Straight up. Is this you and me and into the black? Hate me as you do? I’d rather take my chances on the Styx with the HE if you’re just taking me aboard to space me when we’re out of orbit because you’ve changed your mind. No hard feelings.” All of this with his hands occupied with the sleeping bag fabric, still trying to unsnag his boot. 

“I’ve said it before: if I leave you behind, my cover is blown, because whoever it is will find you, and you’ll have no choice but to spill your guts, even if you try. Leave now, and I can spin it as care for my ship, and I’m giving you another shot. Though the thought of it is making me throw up in my own mouth, just a little. I haven’t figured the Tamsin angle yet. Think about that instead of whether you’ll be spaced. I’ve never spaced anyone, but I’m not making any promises.” He can feel her eyes on him, and he’s not game to look up.

“Just so I’m straight. We’re waltzing into the refrect together, as a couple, and asking Tamsin and Cantor to come with. That’s your plan. You who just held a knife to my throat, and made me walk the corridors to court the cold instead of you.”

There’s silence, and he chances a look. Which is a mistake. “Any other suggestions would be gratefully received. You explain us away in any other fashion that’s less suspicious and deflects attention from Tamsin. Go on, try.” Her voice is flat, inflectionless. Now she’s not looking at him. “Time’s ticking, Pod. In or out.”

“If you can walk into the refrect and sell it, then sure, I’m in. I’m not sure how you’re planning to pull that off, there’s not a soul in that place that’d believe you don’t hate me, but sure, go off I guess. Give me 15 to get my things aboard, then I’ll flank you. Don’t leave without me, or do. Totally up to you. My blood, your hands and so on. Your call, Benita.”

He doesn’t look at her as he pushes through the exit. Traces his steps back and takes the other turn, and this time, finds the port seal airlock. Attaches his helmet. 

A second, to collect his thoughts, flooded with fear, and try to remember what it felt like, that night, the one when he thought she loved him, and put that face on, still with the feel of the cold metal at his throat, and then he grapples the seal open, and he’s in the port, not looking behind to see what she’s doing, ascending into the underworld that is the port, all floating rubble and the stanchions still splayed. 

The storage lockers are built into the wall. For the most part, they’re unwounded, only the most proximate suffering damage, dents and dings and only one that looks run through, and his luck must surely have changed, for none of those is his. His is at the back. The trolley’s mostly full before the 10 minute mark, and he’s feeling optimistic as he locks it all down, clips the locker back in place. Misplaced optimism, because as he turns, there’s Salve with a smirk.

“Where’s that going then? Ship’s busted up. You got some place to be I don’t know about?”

He hopes his face is appropriately sheepish. He tries to remember how he’d felt the morning forever ago, before he’d blown it all to hell and back. Dopey grin from having been thoroughly shagged, puppy dog eyed, the whole enchilada. 

“Yeah. I do.”

He pushes the trolley past him. Salve’s helmet is scratched up, he can see the stress lines.

“Share and enjoy, boyo. Where’s your bolthole then?” Salve’s look of confusion is delicious. 

“Party for one, I’m afraid. There’s a lady, you see. If I can’t board my own ship, might as well board hers, is the general idea.”

“Oh ho ho, I bet you’re boarding something. And who’s the unfortunate soul who’s taken a shine to our young Podraig then? Someone truly desperate?” 

He’s turned back away from the trolley and is on Salve before he know it. 

“You don’t want to speak about her like that, you really don’t.” He hisses it, and the air in his helmet makes it echo, like a cartoon villain.

“Or what? You going to do something about it?”

He shakes his head, the helmet clanking. “Not me.” 

Salve looks confused.

“Her.” Podraig nods across the corridor, She’s in her suit, the hardworking one, but the faceplate’s not masked. She’s looking appropriately feral, and magnificent, the bits he can see. 

“Hi,” he says, and he’s gratified to find that there’s a dopey smile on his face before he can remind himself to put it there, he’s just that good. “I told you I’d be fifteen minutes. Could you not wait that long?”

She’s closer now, and he can see the smile through her faceplate, and he doesn’t care if it’s fake, his little heart does a pitter patter. Even with the cold of his helmet reminding him of her blade.

“No.”

It’s no longer even a dopey grin, it’s a full beam, and he curses his gut for a fool. “Let’s to it then.”

She’s all hands, even with the suit on. She takes full advantage of the fact that he needs both hands on the cart, and he didn’t know he could squeak like that. Even if she is only playing, even if there’s death around the corner, even if not ten minutes before she was threatening to space him, even if it is all for show, it’s a damn good show and he wishes all over again he hadn’t been quite as ham footed as he was all those years ago. Lets himself believe it for the duration of the trip, which is unfortunately shorter with the two of them. She lets him open the door, and he can see, turning back, that Salve’s still watching, so he hands her in over the threshold. He couldn’t say whether her hand was warm in his, or not, for they were wearing suits, but he imagines it is. 

Once they clear the airlock, she’s all business again, directing where to stow his various possessions, and he’s silent. Calculating. 

They speak at the same time, as they reach the sleeping quarters, him with his bag of clothes in hand, her with his sleeping roll, case of the old marrieds. 

“You’ll –“.

“I hope – “.

He pauses, and she’s silent too. He tries again. 

“We should give it at least twenty. For verisimilitude.”

She snorts. “Not my first time round the block. No, you can’t leave hickeys on my neck ‘for verisimilitude’ either. I’ll mess up my hair my own self. In there and in there.”

The bags are stowed. The clothes are in a locker next her own. It’s all very domestic. He feels the whiplash in his gut. The phantom knife at his throat. The smell of her skin.

Then there’s no actual reason to be in the sleeping quarters, and he’s all elbows. As is she. Literally. They collide in the doorway as they both try to be the first out. It’d be a comedy if there was an audience, which blessedly there isn’t. The nav room is bigger and has two seats, a decent distance apart, and both facing the screen, not each other. 

“Quit looking at me like that,” he says. 

“I’m not looking at you like anything. Don’t flatter yourself.” 

He raises an eyebrow. 

She raises one back, and she stares at him, not a hint of a grimace, and not one of a smile either, and he stares back, hoping to not be the one who blinks first. He can feel a flush rising up his neck. The blood in his ears thumping. The world stopping around them. He can’t hold it.

The screen is suddenly incredibly fascinating, although there’s nothing new happening in the port. Lots of stanchions, which he must have seen dozens of times before, but he’s going to count them now, just to be on the safe side, viz a vis the numbers. 

After half a minute, he chances a look. She’s still staring at him.

“Since we’re stuck here. Any thoughts on the who? We’re agreed that someone was after you, right, so somewhere along the line, you must have slipped up. In front of whom did you lose your balance?” She’s playing it straight, he thinks, but he can see the corners of her mouth twitch like she’s laughing at him on the inside. Amused by the disaster, of course, as his Vestan always has been.

“Come on. I think we can agree I’ve never pretended to be particularly balanced in the first place. Not physically capable.”

“I’m not smiling. It was a twitch. I’m tired. Life or death situation, remember?”

“I remember.” He’s remembering, but it’s not the faces of the crew who could have planted the HE. He’s remembering that smile, somewhere between the second and third times. Which is unhelpful, and he needs to focus. Lack of focus is going to get him killed. Either by her, or by the random. He tries to remember the frostbite instead. The knife.

“I’m thinking someone who has access to literally everywhere, to all our stores. Including the mining equipment, and including all the cabins. I’m thinking someone who’s never had a kind word for any Vestan, or for me, for that matter. Has the purse strings. Makes sure we always pay our taxes on time, no matter whether it makes sense to the finances, Someone who has the ear of the Captain, and the ability to intercept comms if he chose.”

“Verde,” she breathes. He can see her suit shake. “Are you sure?”

“No, of course not. Could be any of the miners, they like a bit of HE for breakfast and aren’t fussy about leftovers. Could be the Captain, decided she likes Vesta too much to leave just yet. Could be me, finally snapped, decided to off myself and end all the tension, just stuffed the timing up.”

“Or it could be one of us, one of the Vestan repair crew. We need the work, always. Perhaps Hay decided she didn’t want to pay.”

“Or,” and he pauses, because he doesn’t want to get hit, “it could be Tamsin, cause she doesn’t want to ship aboard, and all, just like you said a month ago. She’s clever, clever enough to figure us out, and sweet enough that she doesn’t want to off her cousin.”

He can see her suit move an inch towards him, and stop.  
“It’s not her.”

“You don’t know that for sure. Do you?”

“Of course not. We don’t know anything for sure. I’m not even sure we’re a we.”

“Come on. Ditch me now and you’ll break my heart. Plus whoever it is will probably kill me.”

“You don’t have a heart.”

There’s a silence, and he’s not sure where she’s going. She’s looking at the screen, there’s movement the other side, about the Styx entry. Lots of suited bodies. Lots of movement. Flashing of lights. Troublesome.

“Verde. I’d bet. He’ll be in there, in the Captain’s ear. That’s got to be long enough for fake sex. Go now?”

“If you want people to think you’re jumping the gun in bed, sure, let’s go now. Tamsin and Cantor go for hours, remember?”

He shudders, dramatically. “Please don’t remind me. I don’t really care if they think I think you’re so hot that I can’t last. Especially given the death factor. Guide me, oh thou great Jehovah.”

“I don’t think that song’s appropriate.” She grabs her helmet, and he follows suit. 

“I don’t think any of this is appropriate, and yet, here we are.”

“Wait.” 

He stops, at her demand. Helmet tight in hand, he waits. The airlock seal is still on.

“Verisimilitude, remember?”

He puts the helmet down, and ruffles his hair. She follows suit. She still frowns.

“Insufficient?”

They look at each other. She’s looking equal parts exasperated and angry. He assumes he’s about the same. 

“The last thing I want to do right now.”

“What is?”

“This,” and she pushes herself off the floor and launches herself into him. She’s not small, and although the jump wasn’t big, it’s enough to unsteady him, rocking on his foot and the prosthetic, and he’s confused, momentarily, until her arm hooks around him, and her face is in close proximity, and then her lips are on his. It should be romantic, a kiss like this, death, HE, and imminent death, past fuckups notwithstanding, but he’s mid exhale and she snorts. It’s a car crash of a kiss, his nose bent and her teeth clashing against his, and he would laugh, but he’s busy.

“Can’t even get this right,” she mutters, and then she’s kissing him properly, thoroughly, a bite to the lower lip here, a lick along his tongue there, and he forgets to pretend that it’s for verisimilitude, and their suits catch on each other, as he anchors her properly, and curses the gloves that he’s wearing that he can’t feel her hair, the suit for blocking them, and when she pulls back, he’s gasping.

“Verisimilitude,” she says, somewhat breathily, and she pushes back, and to the airlock door.


	28. Over the edge of the rainbow

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She'd forgotten about the way in which reality comes spinning back in to take its tithe when you're not looking. Forgotten, and now someone's dead

She’s trying not to smirk as she exits the port seal. Trying not to, and failing. Adrenaline is pumping, and something else, as she waits for him to clear the way so she can double lock it, not that locking matters anymore if people are playing with HE. Her helmet doesn’t quite let him see her face, nor she his, and that’s probably for the best, because she can’t stop grinning. She feels like she’s evened the score in whatever twisted game they’re playing. The helmet, however, makes it easier to focus on the port and the damage that’s been done is more obvious, now that she’s less panicked. Not that she’d admit to being panicked in the first place. A prudent exit to a ship that’s hers and not sabotaged doesn’t necessarily mean that the exitee is panicking. 

There’s flecks of metal studding the floor, and she can see a part of the stanchion in the roof. Someone wasn’t playing. The port door’s sealed up, and she has to enter the code. It hasn’t been sealed in forever, only the internal, and if the port authorities have instituted this kind of lockdown, they’re not playing either. Great. She’s sober again. Sober, and chastened. Running away’s for cowards. She should stay and fight. 

“Refrect and then back, right?” He’s figured out the direct channel. She never said he was stupid. That’d make things easier.  
She wants to stay silent. She wants to pretend she didn’t hear him. She tries to hold her suit between him and the pad, which is useless, he’s taller than she is, and flexible as her suit can be, it’s not quite flexible enough to block his view completely. 

“Refrect as a start,” she says. “Refrect and regroup. Refrect and sleep.”

The door opens, and she goes into the airlock. He’s right behind her, and she can feel his hands on the waist of the suit. There are cameras, she recalls, and it’s appropriate. It’s also a tiny bit comforting, and she tries not to think about that. 

“Refrect, and grab the Tamsinator and the Cantor boy, and scram, I thought was the plan.”

“Let’s just see what happens, shall we? It could just have been a one off. A lucky blast. Hands on me like you mean it, if you don’t mind. Are you backing my play or not?”  
He huffs into the microphone. “Don’t have much of a choice now, do I? I’m telling you though, sometimes things just run their course. Reach their end. This feels like that, don’t you think? If you are thinking, that is. Or did I overestimate you, and all?” 

“Fuck you,” she says quietly and unnecessarily clearly. “it doesn’t have to be an end. Not if we’re careful.”

“You mean lucky,” he says, but she’s taking off her helmet, and doesn’t respond. It’s all normal back here. No signs of cracking, or any damage at all, now that the port airlock seal’s closed. The only sign that there’s anything wrong is the lack of people. There’s usually folk about at this time and she’d half expected them to be back to normal by now. They’ve been holed up in her ship for an hour, at least. And that makes four since the blast happened. 

“Shit.” If there’s no one here, if everyone’s made a typical Vestan decision to retreat and save at least their own skins, then they’re standing out just by being here in the corridor and identifying themselves as the atypical. “Come on. Hurry up.”

She feels his suited hand take hers, and she yanks him forward, and his momentum carries them both forward, a pair of balloons, until they grab the handholds on the tunnel, and self arrest, jerking her shoulder. 

There’s another corridor, and this time he launches her, and they arrest with a little more grace, and her shoulder’s not quite as jarred. It’s different travelling in tandem. Requires more thought. There’s someone who pops out from one of the house seals, and back in again as they pass. Could have been anyone, she’s lost track today. Another corridor, and another, until they traverse the span over to the refrect, and she’s not quite out of breath, but she’s not cool, calm and collected either, as she opens the seal. 

The lights are on, and no one’s home, except for Tamsin. Silent and still, holding the edge of a bar stool.

“Well,” says Podraig. “That was easy. Easier than expected.”

She goes to shut him down, sharp end of the tongue, and then remembers that she’s meant to be selling it. “Luck, I told you. Where’s Cantor, then?”

Tamsin’s face, now that she looks more closely, is set. Tears lensing in her eyes, and they’re red. She doesn’t want to ask the next question.

“Tam?”

The back door opens, and Juan appears, but no one else. 

“What’s happening?” she asks, and she feels Pod’s hand squeeze hers.

Tamsin turns, and finds her mother. Puts her arms around her, and Ben can see her chest heaving. She can feel her own start too. Her stomach’s churning over. 

“Where’s Marcia? What happened?”

There’s a pause. Then Juanita talks, over the top of Tamsin’s head. “I’ve lost her. She’s gone, Ben. We knew it was only a matter of time, and this was hers. The steroids didn’t help. Nothing helped. In simple truth, she’s dead. She’s dead, Ben.”

The guilt crashes down like a gust of air from a rebreather. She’d run away to save her own skin, and she’d run away with the fear, and she’d run away with the drama of it all, truth be told, and she’d run away and her aunt was dead. 

Tamsin speaks, though she doesn’t turn. “She just choked. That was it. And she’s gone. She’s gone.”

It’s too much. “Shouldn’t Cantor be here? Shouldn’t he? Where the hell is he?”

“Oh stop. He’s not with me. Not anymore. With his mother, I suppose. Leave it, Ben. Just leave it.”

“He should be here with you.” She awkwardly pats them both, heavy gloved. 

Juan firmly pats Tamsin on the back, releases herself, and pushes over to the seal. Flips the lock. “Pull yourself together. Try thinking of someone beyond yourself for a change, you don’t get to have hysterics. Not when we have that thug waiting to find a way to space us all. Now. Cantor has gone with his mother, because Tamsin is accused of being the saboteur, and he has the backbone of a jellyfish, and Hay is not the woman I thought she was and the only woman I ever thought anything of is dead. Benita, I cannot deal with your crazy now. Not ever. My wife is dead, and we’re waiting for the port authorities to come and arrest us all, but in particular Tamsin. Pull it together or out. Is that clear enough?”

Ben gulps a sob down. She nods, and blinks the lenses off her eyes. 

“More than clear. You know it can’t be her.”

Tamsin shrinks down and holds a bar stool, melding herself around its form like a plastic bag blown by the vacuum. She tries not to listen to the noises that Tamsin’s making, worse than any choking that she’d ever heard from her aunt, even on the worst nights. 

Extricates her hand from Pod’s firm grip. Is vaguely aware that he’s holding the back of her suit steady. 

“Of course it’s not fucking her,” her aunt spits. “That shit Verde is spinning his web of lies, and I have nothing, nothing that I can do to fix any of this. PortAuth have no cameras on that part of the port, so they say. That’s got to be false too. They have cameras everywhere in the port. This, this is a lie from top to bottom.”

She can feel him tugging her back. 

“Forgive the intrusion,” he says, and he does sound properly contrite. “I can help, I think. What say you to a bit of cloak and dagger?”

“It’s no business of yours. We’d none of this problem before the Styx berthed this time around, and frankly, the sooner you’re all gone, the better.” Juanita spits as she talks and the atmos is clouded.

Ben turns to meet his raised eyebrow. He shrugs. She shrugs back. “He’s staying with me. I mean, we’re going. I mean, Tam could come with us.”

Her aunt barks a short laugh. “As ever, you make so little sense with your convoluted sentences. Your ship is airtight, you think? And you’re going to head into space now? Why not. Why on earth not?   
Nothing makes any sense anymore. Tamsin’s an explosives expert and you’re a space pilot. And I’m stuck here on this rock with a refrect I bought for Marcia and she’s gone forever. Take yourself and the secrets you and she shared, yes, of course I knew about them, she was my wife, do you think I wouldn’t notice? PortAuth know too. You know how transmissions spread, did you really think they wouldn’t track you back? If PortAuth didn’t think it was fine, you’d have been spaced and her before you, for heavens sake. Take yourself and that man, who is it in the Styx suit? Podraig? Are you kidding me? Podraig? Are you fucking kidding me? Just, out. Out now. I don’t want you here. I don’t want any of this. An hour, and we’ll talk. Out.”

Ben turns to Tamsin, but she’s her head in her hands, and isn’t looking at anyone. “Come with me, just come. Come for now and we’ll figure the rest out.”

Tamsin doesn’t move. Not until her mother pushes her, none too gently, towards the seal. “Out.” 

“Wait,” says Pod. “Cloak and dagger bit. How do you feel about enclosed spaces?”


	29. Spinning the web

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which lies are sold

The cart’s heavy, and his stump is starting to hurt. He’s not built for this, and yet he’s not stopping. There’s been several stops so far, the PortAuth reps now out in full force. She’s mobbed him each time, arms entwined, melting looks of sweet chocolate and the best imitation of a love struck fool that she can imagine, loosely built around Tamsin’s acts, no doubt. He’s milking his imitation of Cantor for all he’s worth too, and either the PortAuth reps buy it, or they’re too distracted to care, or their little melodrama isn’t worth the hill of beans they thought it was, and the joyful sight of the Dog’s Breakfast muzzle hoves into view.

Which is when she stops the cart. There’s oxygen enough in the cart, but it’s still a bit dicey, he would have thought. If it were his cousin in the cart, he’d be wanting to get her safely inside. Out of the cart, and into the atmos of the ship.

“These things are soundproof, right?” 

He nods, then remembers the suit blocking his movement. “Maybe. Mine’s potentially got ears back to the Styx. Because?”

She grimaces. Mouths something at him, which could be anything, he can’t see properly.

“This isn’t what you signed on for. Ship out with the rest of them. Tamsin will be safe enough with me. As safe as she can be. Go be with the other girls in the other ports.” 

He can hear the air hissing in his ears. If she’s saying what he thinks she’s saying under the faff about the romance, that Vesta, that she’s blown and he needs to keep the rest of the network fed with information, she’s not wrong. Nothing she says is actually incorrect. 

“Nah.”

She turns herself in the suit so he can see her face. Objectively, it’s actually a pretty nice face. Two eyes, a nice nose, lips he wouldn’t mind exploring a bit more and a scar that’s more interesting than ugly, now. The face she’s making isn’t a nice face, now that the PortAuth’s gone, and Tamsin’s not watching, and she doesn’t have to pretend. Eyebrows furrowed together, like she’s trying to puzzle out the mystery of why he’s not co-operating. 

“I want you to go. I know you know it’s the right thing to do for you. Leave the Vestan sewer rats to look after their own, and get gone. You broke my heart once before, and you’re going to do it again at some point. We’ve had a good couple of hours, go on, time to call it quits.”

Now her face is screwed up like she’s going to cry. Perhaps she is actually crying. She’s a better actor than he is. Or she’s not acting.

“Nup.”

She lets go the cart, after carefully applying some hydraulic brakes. He wonders briefly about the security cameras, and how tight the visuals might be. Whether they can see her face. His face. Read lips. Tap the feed. She hasn’t said anything too incriminating yet. Yet.

“Would it be strange if I said I loved you, at this point?” He’s holding his face in what he imagines to be the Cantor folk singer pose, and he’s turning on the melting eyes, to the extent he has any. 

“I don’t know, is that the sort of thing you’re likely to say? Do you think I’m going to say I love you back?”

He’s trying, he really is. It’s hard to signal from way over where he is, to way over where she is on the other side of the cart, in a space suit, when you’re not sure whether your sound and or actions are being monitored. He steps as close as he can into her space, and her eyes go wide, but she doesn’t step back. Puts his facemask up to hers. She’s watching his mouth.

Mouths, as best he can, the word security, and looks questioningly up for cameras as best he can, without moving his suit. 

He never said she wasn’t quick. She nods back, just with her chin, and then she’s back into lovebird mode.

It still takes him by surprise when she speaks. She starts quiet, but the quiet doesn’t last.

“I’m not admitting anything. I’m not denying anything either. I’m just sorry for my cousin. My aunt. How could he leave her like that? Her own mother dead. Oh god. Marcia’s really dead. I can’t even remember the last thing she said to me and now she’s dead. Did I thank her for breakfast yesterday even? I can’t remember. I can’t. And your Cantor. If he loved her, how could he?”

He can’t think of anything to say to that. He’d like to say the right thing. To make the crying stop. Especially now, when he can’t tell what of it’s real, and what of it isn’t. She’s making gasping noises like she can’t breathe and they’re in vacuum and he needs her to move to a place where they’re not. 

“Look. We weren’t there. We don’t know what happened. Cantor’s never been one to stand up against his mother, and I bet she pulled rank. It’s the sort of thing she does. Don’t think I’m not coming back to the first thing you said, but you pulled a dead aunt, and I think we need to get moving before you have a dead cousin too.” He’s trying for a smile. He doesn’t get it.

She shoves the cart, hard, and it doesn’t move. He’s trying not to tell her about the brakes she applied because she’ll throttle him. That lasts two seconds, because she’s pushing really hard, and she’s going to break something herself, and when he flips the switch and releases the brakes, the cart leaps forward, and it takes both of them to wrangle it back under control, and not off the edge into the uncertainty of have they achieved escape velocity for Tamsin and a more definite end to her puzzle. 

All he can hear for a minute, as they progress, the dark of the wall on one side and the intermittent light of the port and space beyond to the other, is his ragged breathing in his helmet, as he tries to get it under control. His stump hurts again, because jarring the prosthetic is a bitch. Playing at being a lovesick fool’s exhausting on top of all that. Which is to say that his temper’s fraying.

“She,” she pants, “was willing to give up her whole life here for him. You remember, we argued about it, and you’ll remember, I said it was a bad idea, and you got all gooey eyed about the concept. Now look, he’s abandoned her. Bloody men.” 

He can’t see her face and he doesn’t want to. “Do you want me to say you were right? Because you’re always right and I’m always wrong and that’s why I should bugger off? Tell me then, go on. What could I possibly do that’s going to redeem me in your eyes, at this point, with your cousin trapped the way she is, and your aunt dead in the refrect, and Cantor being the usual self protective unthinking post teenager he always is? There’s nothing. Nothing good lasts for ever, and whatever of the good that we had is gone. It’s done. I’m not apologising to you again because you never take it. Even if I am sorry, it doesn’t change anything. I’m not saying it again. Not for Cantor. Not for nothing. Tell me an actual thing I can do to fix this, because I’m out of options.”

“You want a thing to do? An actual thing you could do to start to fix this,” and she taps the box. “I’ll tell you a thing. Space Cantor.”

He stops in his tracks, but the cart doesn’t, and it lurches forward, and his stump is definitely blistered. Hisses between his teeth. 

“Ha. Knew it. Go back to your Styx crew, boyo. No berth for you with me if we’re not eye to eye on this one.” She pushes the cart with a hefty shove, and they’re at the seal.

He doesn’t let go. Not until she turns him to face her. Faceplate to faceplate.

She mouths at him, but it takes several seconds to figure out what she’s saying. She’s saying “convincing?”. They’ve just staged a fight. A lovers’ tiff, if you will. She’s given him the out, again. Although he’s betting she actually would quite like Cantor done and gone for good.

He grabs her elbows, and he’s not deconstructing the why of his actions, until his mouth opens. “I’ll go back, alright. I’ll make him pay, for what he’s done to her. I’ll give you this, when you’re right, you’re right. And I love you anyway, even though you’re horrible when you’re right. Don’t go anywhere without me. Please.”

He can’t tell what she’s thinking inside the helmet. But at least she and Tamsin are safe. Good deed for the day done, and he’ll figure out what he thinks about all of the things he said, later. After he’s found the Styx crew, navigated his way around the Verde situation, and had a heart to heart with Cantor, all of which are more important than whether he’s told, accidentally, some version of the truth. His stump hurts as he walks the long way back to the tunnels. On a whim, he turns to check, and unaccountably, she’s still there, struggling with the sticking seal. He doesn’t wave. Neither does she.


	30. PartAuth and security and oh my

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which several somethings click into place

Tamsin’s quiet when she’s extricated. Tear streaks and all, it’s like she’s collapsed into herself, a black hole. Ben wants to go back to the refrect right now, right right now and see her aunts. Her aunt. Wants to be able to tell Tamsin it’s all going to be okay, and so she does, but she feels the lie in every cell of her body. 

It’s too hard to know what to say. So she makes tea. Tamsin sits and sips at the bulb and burns her tongue, Ben can see it, and still she doesn’t talk. Would she start with her aunt’s death, or Cantor’s cowardly betrayal? Everything is awful and there’s no refuge from it. No comfort to give or to find. 

It must have been an hour, what with the walking, and the deep and meaningfuls, and the decanting of a cousin and the makings of tea, and all. When she looks at her comm though, it’s only been half that. The time’s dragging, and she half needs something else to happen so that she doesn’t think about her aunt, finally choking and gasping herself to death. She’ll never hear Marcia’s voice again, not properly. She’ll never be invited back into the kitchen to make a nuisance of herself tasting the stews, and the cakes and the infusions wafting their scent around. Nothing’s meant to last forever, Podraig damn his eyes, had half said, and he was right, damn him.

Her little kitchen’s very small for all of the feelings that she’s having. Tamsin seems to agree, because she’s now wandering the corridors, drifting through, snagging the holds absently, on automatic although she’s never been in the Dog’s Breakfast before. Touching the wood panels. Raising her eyebrows at the pink stripping, but polite as ever, not saying a word. She trails after Tamsin, because she’s not certain when Tam’s going to snap, just that she’s going to.

Tamsin holds still when she reaches the green room. Starts inspecting the leaves for yellow, bad bugs, lack of nutrient, she’s on automatic, and at least she’s doing something. It’s heartening. Ben is heartened. It’s time to breach a topic. Any topic.

“Want to stay? It’s a nice little ship. No holes in it. I have plants.”

She thinks, for a minute, that Tamsin’s not going to bite. 

“You have some plants. Some. None of them are particularly interesting.”

Ben looks at her green walls. They look plenty interesting to her. Edible, green, and they keep growing, ticks all the boxes she cares about. Kicks herself on to another topic.

Reaches a hand out half way over to Tam. “I can’t believe she’s gone. I’m so sorry, Tam. She told me, only yesterday, thousands of days left in her. She did.”

Tam turns away. “Gee, I’m sorry that she let you down by going ahead and dying without your permission. It’s not about you, Ben.”

One more shot, because she’s a masochist. “Cantor. How exactly did that go down? I don’t understand. When I left you, you were all smoochy feelings and how he was looking forward to not having to miss you any more, and now he’s turning you into the spy who blew up his ship? I mean, really? You wouldn’t even know how.”

“Wouldn’t I. What, because I’m not you? I’m not miss mechanic, give me a lever and I can move this ship? You don’t think I’m capable?”

Ben’s backed up against one of the walls, the leaves around her jumpsuit like protection. “God, Tam. I’m not saying you’re anything. Are you?”

Tamsin inspects a leaf more closely, for long enough that Ben can see the aircurrents move in the room, the leaves flicking in their path.

“I’m going to adjust your nutrient setting. I think you could get better performance. If I still had my synthkit, I could upgrade your kitchen. Pity it got lost.” She looks up at Ben.

“Are you?” 

Tamsin unleashes the leaf, and it bobs back into its rightful place. 

“The synthkit was a good one. I put it together myself. It had so much potential. I’d made so many things. I couldn’t leave it behind, could I?”

Ben shakes her head, slowly. She can feel the jigsaw forming shape. 

“Did you, by any chance, forget about stability issues in low atmos? Did you forget on purpose? You knew we were retesting the hull. What did Verde do to you? To aunt?”

Tamsin takes hold of another leaf, a bigger one. There’s a word on the cusp of coming out, and Ben holds her breath to hear it.

Which is when the ship’s intercom clicks on. 

“PortAuth, requesting inspection.” It’s the voice of Matteus, who she knows like the back of her hand, but with an inflection that she’s never heard used on her before. It’s flat, and it’s somewhat scary.  
She clicks the responder. “Just a minute.”

To Tamsin, now. “Is there anything else I need to know? Any other little hidden accidents waiting to happen?”

Tamsin looks her dead on. “Not on this ship.”

“Great.”

Matteus has his best stern face on, once she exits the seal. It’s not exactly unexpected. It’s not exactly welcome either.

“Going to need to check your manifold. Might need to do an actual. We’ll have to let you know.”

She taps at the communicator, and brings it up. “Is this a special for me because I’m your favourite? Or are you doing everyone in alphabetical. What’s the story?”

Matteus looks at her comm, and only her comm. Doesn’t rise to the bait. Taps at the screen. Frowns. Taps some more. Frowns again. Hands it back.

“You need more water. You need a better recyc. You need some more interesting things for me to check on. There’s nothing good here. Do I need to sneak on board and salt something up? You’re boring.” Matteus says all this, deadpan, but then, with his facemask up to hers. There’s something afoot. “Keep Tamsin on board for another 24 hours. Just keep her out of sight. There’s something going on, and no one wants to know about it. You know, the usual. Must be Tuesday.”

Despite herself, she smiles. “No, it’s normally a Wednesday, isn’t it? You know my aunt’s dead, don’t you.”

He backs away, and the facemask’s no longer touching. “That all seems to be in order. If you see anything suspicious, please be certain to send an alert. PortAuth’s always monitoring those frequencies. We have cameras,” and he pauses, “everywhere”.

He directs his head slantwise, over at the Styx. There is, in fact, a security camera trained on the hull. Now that she looks at it, there’s one trained at the Dog’s Breakfast also, and all the pantomime wasn’t for naught. 

“I’ll be sure to cover up the windows then,” she says, attempting a laugh. 

“Sure. Won’t help, though. We have cameras,” and he pauses, and tilts his head to the other side of the port, “just about everywhere on this rock. Everywhere a person would think to go”.

Which means that her aunt was right. Which means that she’s been acting under the supervision, and tacit approval of PortAuth. Not that she’s done anything relatively germane to the hull of the Styx being burst like a bubble, but all of that’s got to add up to something. 

She’s back inside when she figures it. PortAuth know it wasn’t Tamsin, and they know who it was. And they want her out of the way while they deal with it. She’s sent Podraig back into a killing field.  



	31. Chasing shadows

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sometimes the right thing is the only thing left to do. Then you've go to do it. Whatever it takes.

His stump solidly aches. They’re not at the Styx, of course they’re not, but that’s the first place he thinks to look, and he’s looked, and they’re not there, nobody is. The corridors are empty again. There’s no way that they’re back in the refrect. None. He has no desire to front Juan on his own, and Benita can call him a coward all she likes. He’ll think about all the things that came out of their mouths later. Think about how the future’s going to play out, on that ship, the three of them, no pilot if he can’t pull this off, later. He has no intention of spacing anyone.

Except himself if he doesn’t sit down soon, because every time he moves now, the stump’s jolting on something. He’s almost afraid to know whether the blister’s progressed to a bloodbath. The suit can stay on for now, but when it comes off, there’s going to be pain. And he can’t think about that either.

The only other avenue he can think of to try is to front the PortAuth directly. If he were Captain Hay, convinced that a Vestan had blown her ship to bits, that’s where he would go first. Presumably. If he were Captain Hay, suspecting that one of her own had done it, would he still? The Captain’s good at double bluffs, he’s seen in the past dealing with space pirates on the conn, dealing with fractious crew members unhappy at their split of the pie. She’d be capable of going along to the PortAuth with Verde and questioning PortAuth, just to see the look on Verde’s face. And then what? For all his knowledge of the Captain, and his knowledge of her tactics, he doesn’t know her long play strategy on this one. Verde’s been her offsider for years. She has a working relationship that works. She’s capable, too, of deciding to turn a blind eye if she needs to. For instance, she must know about the illicit messages he sends, and Frieda before him, he’s at his desk in the con too long to justify the time he spends. She’s not stupid.

He knows where the PortAuth office is. He’s even been in it, close to naked, frostbitten and alone, and he likes to think that a two out of three improvement isn’t bad. It is easier to find the office, it transpires, when one isn’t naked and cold. The PortAuth office is sealed up, but the lights are on. It opens after he knocks, and the scene is full. There’s Captain Hay, across the desk from the guy who’s been nothing but a suit to nod at over the years, on the way in, and the name won’t come, but there’s a sign on the desk, Chen, so it doesn’t have to. Verde’s in the corner, sitting legs sprawled, arms behind his head, the picture of relaxed, and Salve standing behind him, the picture of not, and Cantor to the right, rigid with nerves. No sign of the other crew members.

The door’s opened automatically, and the occupants don’t look best pleased to see him. Which is not new, at the current time. 

“A word, Captain Hay?” he asks, with no hope of getting it.

“As you can see, Podraig, this is hardly the time. My ship has a gash in its side that’s fresher than a clean pair of socks from the laundry, and I have a pressing need for an explanation.” Hay leans forward, fingers steepled, looking keenly at Chen. 

Chen’s a slight figure, as far as men goes. Tall, as far as Vestan men go, with the long limbs of someone who’s been on Vesta for too long, and spent too long behind a desk, pushing numbers, pushing ships, keeping the air turned on for everyone else. He’s not looking keenly at Hay, he’s looking at a viewer on his desk, which he’s not sharing.

“And as I keep telling you, I’m still in the process of gathering information. I have no desire to have your ship splayed out all over my dock one minute longer. It’s been there quite long enough, tying up the space and the time of our citizens. That invoice for the first repair’s still unpaid, you know.” Chen speaks evenly, and a tone or two lower than the calm voice that usually accompanies port announcements. 

Salve leans forward, hands on Verde’s shoulders. “So that’s the game, is it? You sneak a bomb aboard so we have to pay you twice? Space rats, the lot of you. Despicable money grubbers.”

Verde shrugs his shoulders free. “No. I think it’s worse than that. I think this whole rock is in on it. Citizens? You don’t have a place to be a citizen of, not without Earth’s say so. You shouldn’t be asking us to pay for repairs, you should be thanking us for keeping you connected to the chain of colonies that makes you something. Makes you part of Earth. Makes you alive, instead of dead. You’re nothing without us. Now. You look at whatever you need to look at. Gather whatever precious information you need. But at the end of the day, at the end of your investigation, not only does my ship need to be fixed, I need to know that you’ve spaced whoever’s responsible for this sabotage.”

Podraig shuts the door and waits for the seal to hiss itself shut, which it does. He can see Hay bristling at Verde’s casual assertion of ownership of the Styx, and can see too the force of will that it’s taking her to not react in front of Chen, but only because he knows that when she tucks her hair behind her ears, she’s incredibly angry and then’s the time to watch his tongue, and she’s doing it now.

Chen taps at his keyboard, and ignores Verde. “Captain, I’ll have an update for you in an hour. I regret the refrect’s shut, but there’s a dorm room down the passage, if you and your crew would care to hold there with your personal effects. The ones that aren’t still out in the passage. I’ll send a broadcast out to direct any stragglers there. We can put you up in there until we’ve tended to this.”

“Much obliged, PortAuth. To be clear, what I’m interested in is ensuring the safety of the rest of my ship. Your word on that, if you’d be so good. Anything happens to the Styx from now, I’m likely to take it very personally. Are we clear on that?” Captain Hay’s voice is as low now as PortAuth Chen’s. 

Chen looks up. “Oh, we are supremely clear. If anyone’s damaging the safety of this port and this station, there will be consequences. Vestans take that very personally. Good day, Captain.”

Behind Podraig, the door opens automatically, air hissing. He tries not to startle, but it’s been a long couple of hours, and his stump is tired, and he’s simply not as good at playing high stakes poker as Chen and Hay, and he has to steady himself on the wall. Salve knocks him as he pushes past, and he’s last out the door, Cantor reaching out a hand, which he gratefully takes, allowing the tow. It’s been a long day. They none of them speak until they’re all trundled along the corridor to the dorm room, which turns out to be as bleak as any hostel he’s ever stayed in, rows of bunk beds, and small store lockers, and a small refresher at the end, and muzak built on a annoyingly perky earworm of a tune emanating from somewhere he can’t immediately locate and destroy. The beds are ungiving, and have straps, and Podraig’s not feeling as grateful as he should when he makes his suit bend, so he can sit, and the weight comes off his stump, finally. There’s a rush of blood to his head, or so it seems, and the room swims, and he honestly doesn’t mean to collapse back onto the solid surface in the manner of a fainting Victorian earther, but he’s not actually out, so he’s counting that as a win.

At least he doesn’t think he’s passed out, but by the time he sits back up, narrowly missing the upper bunk with his head, everyone’s in their inner jumpsuits, their outers piled by the door, and there’s a good number more of his crewmates in the room, all the bunks full. Everyone’s here.

There’s a good deal of noise now, a buzz, a hum like a badly tuned engine shaking and he doesn’t like it at all. He can see, out of the corner of his eye, Salve and Verde conferring in a corner, a couple of the ice miners around them listening intently. Other side of the room, there’s Hay and Cantor, dissecting a meal bar, crumbs spreading, a cloud of dust about them. As he turns his head further, he can see clumps of people all looking about, no one’s safe, no one’s sure. 

He tries not to think about how his stump feels as he moves towards Cantor, but it’s inescapable, until the weight brings it numbness. The numbness helps. He’s able to grab hold of the bunk nearest Hay, and pull himself in, and then he can sit down again, and he bites his lip as the blood rush happens again, but resists the passing out. This time.

“Ah, Podraig,” says Hay. “Strange times aboard Vesta 4. What do you make of all this?”

He pauses. What does he think about all this? What can he say about what he makes about all of this? How much can Verde hear from where he sits if he chooses to say it? His stump throbs.  
“It’s not a Vestan. It’s not Tamsin. I’m betting Verde.”

Cantor coughs. “She didn’t deny it, Pod. She didn’t.” Cantor goes back to tapping the remnants of the meal bar on the table, and the meagre gravity pulls the crumbs slowly down.

Pod looks around the room, but no one’s looking as shocked as he is. No one’s listening at all.

“Hay, are you sure he’s yours? I mean, one hundred percent sure? Could he have been swapped in the hospital? Or perhaps he was dropped on his head in grav? Because there’s no way he got this from you.” 

Hay examines the bunk, the fabric between her fingers. “I’m open to all the possibilities. Cantor took her on board, and left her unsupervised. The opportunity was there. I’m not saying I believe him, but the opportunity was there.”

His stump is throbbing and his suit is sticky. “You know, this was the girl you were going to marry. You trusted her enough for that, both of you. What changed?”

“Don’t. It hurts enough as it is. To know that she’d try to kill us all like that. I loved her. I love her still.”

“Keep it down,” Hay says, in a voice deliberately casual. “We’re just managing the risk.”

It’s going to hurt, but he does it anyway. It helps that he holds the bunk rail to pull himself slowly up, minimises the jar as the weight goes back onto the prosthetic.

“I’ve never steered you wrong, not even when I was an apprentice. Never. Verde’s losing it. Has lost it. This is the time to choose the future direction of the Styx, not to sound all sanctimonious. But do you want it to be a ship that answers back to Earth, flies in fear of what might happen if Verde decides you’ve made a disloyal choice? Even against the loss of a good person, the woman Cantor says he loves? I don’t want to do this. I don’t.”

Cantor shakes his head. “Podraig, don’t be such a fool.” He’s turning the meal bar over in his hands now, punctuating each turn with a tap on the bunk bed. The crumbs have trajectories now, escaping Cantor’s orbit, and starting to spread around the room.

Hay reaches out a hand. “Then don’t do it.”

His throat is dry, and he has to clear it. “It’s been a pleasure and a privilege, but I’m going to have to take my leave. Apologies, but you’ll need to find another navigator. Ship’s charts are up to ate and so’s the log, for what that’s worth, my bunk and locker are empty, and I’m gone. She’s dead, you know.”

Cantor stops tapping. The crumbs don’t arrest themselves.

“Marcia, I mean. She wasn’t well, I understand, ever. But the stress of it, Cantor. She’s dead. Tamsin’s mother. Write that up in the Styx logbook, against all the other things for which you take credit. I dare you.”

Cantor looks at Hay. Hay looks at Podraig. “So you do your own investigation. Whatever it is that Verde says, do try to think for yourself. Not swallow whole whatever Earther man over there’s telling you. Do try.”

He turns, and realises that the room’s silent. Verde’s looking at him, and so’s Salve, and he wonders if he’s going to make it to the door. He starts the hobble, because sometimes you just have to try, even if you know that the odds are stacked against you., and even if your stump is killing you. Unaccountably, he’s not stopped. Unaccountably, he’s patted on the back, by just about every bunk that he passes, and the last bunk, one of the fellas, couldn’t tell you which one, because he has water lenses in front of his eyes, shakes his hand. Outside the door, he pauses for a breath, and wipes his eyes. 

Sets his shoulder. Puts his helmet back on, and snicks it in. 

The way back to the Dog’s Breakfast is shorter this time round, because he knows where he’s going, and there’s no cart. It feels strangely normal to be standing in front of the door, but he still can’t get up the nerve to knock. In this moment, he’s free. He could stay on Vesta. He could wait for the next ship to pass, and reinvent himself.

The door opens, and he goes in.


	32. A nice bulb of tea and a good lie down

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's all about the versimilitude.

She’s not going to stand at the door and welcome him in, even if she’s opened it enough for him to enter. She’s far too busy for politeness. If he’s back, he’s back. He can be here or not, it’s no difference to her. 

She can hear the door shut. She locks it again behind him. There’s no need for dropping security at this point. 

Tamsin’s not moved from the second sleeping quarters, although she’s checked in on her enough times with offers of tea to be told that she’s annoying and to go away. 

She’s not trying to be annoying. She’s just trying not to think. She’s finding her eyes full of water at inconvenient moments, when she’s trying to remember if she added water and nutrients to the green wall, or if she’s updated the databases since the year dot. Which of course she has, she’s anal about things like not running into other asteroids, but she’s still going to check. 

She doesn’t want to keep crying, is the thing. She’s cried herself dry and she wants to stop. She’s thrown up twice. She didn’t have a chance to say goodbye. Not to her little piece of Vesta, everything she cares about is on the Dog’s Breakfast. No, anyone who wants her sad little collection of bits with which to chisel on the surface, and frayed cables, and blankets, is welcome to all that. 

Marcia had a laugh, which was by necessity low, and gentle, anything more would bring on a fit. Ben would try, she really would, to not make her laugh, but sometimes it was necessary to explain exactly why she had a bit of solder on the outside of her suit, or how she’d ended up stuck upside down, or how if you sang at a high enough pitch through a suit radio anything sounds like a frog on helium, and she’d be rewarded by this low giggle, all throaty and rounded in sound, and Ben could feel like she wasn’t the worst person on the rock. Like she’d earnt her place in the family, freely given with no strings, an anomaly on Vesta 4. Then, of course, there were the times when Ben made her hurt, by saying something true and thoughtless, like adding cinnamon to everything dulled the tastebuds, after, of course, she’d eaten the whole plate of noodles in question. Marcia would take it, and take the dirty plate, and disappear into the kitchen, and Ben would know that she’d done it again, and that although she could say sorry, which she would, of course she would, it wouldn’t take the hurt away. 

The thing was, Ben couldn’t remember whether she was in the needing to say sorry state at the moment or not. What the actual last thing she’d said to Marcia could have been. Was it a thing that was ordinary, and banal, like, don’t wait for me aunt on the refrect shift scheduling, I’ll be down at the docks for the walkthrough? Or had she said goodbye properly, thanked her for breakfast, like a good child leaving for a day of school, and learning? Had she quarrelled with her aunt, as she sometimes did in the morning, about something that really truly didn’t matter at all, about whether she needed to service her suit, which of course she had, living and breathing in it every day, or brought in her share of the load from the green space, which she couldn’t remember doing recently anyway, or bit her tongue with the Styx crew, which she wasn’t going to? 

If she was a good person, which she’s not, she would go down and check whether the hobbling meant anything, because of course she’s watched him and the slow progress across the port rim. Viewed alternatively, which she’s choosing to do, she’s affording him privacy, because he’s going to need to take the outer suit off in order to deal with whatever his situation is. 

It’s been five minutes, and he’s still not emerged. 

She’s not actually looking for him, as such. She’s just checking that it was Pod, and not some other random who she’d inadvertently given admission to the Dog’s Breakfast. It’s not like she’s worried about him.

The sleeping quarters is where she finds him, after a false lead in the green room, where she’d simply forgotten to turn the mister off and the plants are now slightly overwatered. Which will self correct. Unlike Pod. 

He’s managed to take most of the suit off, but it’s stuck on the prosthetic. Or so she’s guessing, because he’s lying back on the sleeping platform, with the suit around his leg. 

On further examination, he’s also either asleep or unconscious, but either way he’s breathing, and on closer examination, he has a pulse. 

The suit sticks on his knee and he still doesn’t wake. She’s as gentle as she can be, which is nowhere near gentle enough, if he were awake, but appears to be sufficient while he’s out. 

The suit, incidentally, reeks. There’s sweat, but there’s also that sweeter note of blood. 

Once it’s all the way off, she can see why. The prosthetic attachment has become dislodged, and has rubbed not just a blister, but the stump raw and bleeding. There’s no red streaks up the leg that she can see, although his undershorts are hiding further up. She realises, belatedly, that she doesn’t necessarily have permission for this kind of examination, and is probably violating unwritten rules of consent fifteen ways to Sunday, but given the blood, and that he’s passed out, she’s probably going to be forgiven. She doesn’t stop.

The antibiotic spray from her medicine cabinet is used liberally, as are the disposable cotton towels. She has a little snowdrift of them when she’s finished, ableit as red a snowdrift as if the snow’s been used as a killing ground for something. She has bandages, but none quite suited, and she uses a lot of them, and hopes that he doesn’t mind the hairpulling that’s going to eventuate when he needs to remove them. His legs are hairier than they used to be. 

She’s no crutches, but hopes that she can smooth over the situation with pirate jokes, until the stump’s healed enough to reattach the prosthetic, and redon the suit. 

With the suit and the prosthetic, she’s on surer ground. After all, that’s just machinery, and machinery is her thing, not red blood cells. She gives the suit the standard clean, twice over, to be sure. It moves smoothly enough, he’s treated the jointing well since he’s had it, and she can’t remember if it’s of the right vintage to be the one she first met him in. Hates the fact that she’s thinking about it, and that night again. It’s distracting. 

The prosthetic. She can’t remember having paid any attention to the mechanics of it, on that night when she was more than distracted, but she can figure it now, having seen the attachment on his leg, and on the prosthetic, and the bits on the prosthetic that are out of alignment. She takes it, and the snowdrift, down to the engine bay, to visit with the toolkit. The red snowdrift gets fed to the recycler. The prosthetic receives a deep introduction to her toolkit, and it’s somewhat satisfying to have to tinker with precision, and just the right amount of force, when usually she’s working on a larger scale, and it gives her the right amount of distraction, such that she doesn’t really hear him when he enters. At which point, there’s waves of guilt. If it’s lacking in politeness to remove without consent the suit and prosthetic of either your enemy, or viewed another way, a guest, with whom one has been corresponding for years in an increasingly friendly fashion, then it’s beyond the pale to also remove said prosthetic from the immediate vicinity of said guest without leaving an explanation.

Luckily, she’s about finished, and is able to stop. The metal shavings, she collects with her microvacuum. Her nerves, not so much.

He’s holding the door handle, and looking down at her with little quirks around his mouth, crinkles around his eyes, like he’s amused, not annoyed, and she guesses that she’s been pre-emptively forgiven, which is probably for the best, since she’s still holding his leg, and has the power to send it into orbit around the room. Not that she’s going to. She doesn’t know how to make a spare. He’d be stuck. That wouldn’t be appropriate, since he’s evidently decided to stay.

Has he?

She can’t reach him from where she’s sitting. Which means she can’t hand him his leg. She feels awkward standing, her knees crack, and her back’s in need of a stretch, which she feels too self conscious to execute. She holds it out, mid reach realising that he won’t be able to reach, and that she’ll have to move to achieve it, and by the time she moves, he’s already done it, and they collide in the centre of the room. Her free hand grabs onto his shoulder for balance. There’s more there than she remembers, more muscle, broader shoulders, more of a physical presence than the Podraig she remembers from all the years ago, more real than the words from the unknown contact with whom she’s been dealing for years. He’s going to be actually here, on her ship, for better or for worse, unless and until their cover is blown. This is a thing that’s happening.

She makes herself let go, and pushes the leg into his hands. She’s pre-emptively embarrassed about holding it, on his behalf. He doesn’t seem to be, turning from her, and bracing up on the wall, and reattaching it, with a wince as it snicks into position, and she wants to tell him not to put in on for her, that it needs time to heal, and she doesn’t know if the attachment’s sterile, she’s only ever used her tools on inanimate objects before, which he’s not. He’s very not. 

“Got any jobs going?” he asks, almost casually. “Only I find myself unemployed. You’ll have seen where I came from? There’s a kangaroo court in there, all possibilities, all slurs being considered. I find myself sick at it. Can I take you up on the offer, if you can stomach it?”

She clears her throat. “The offer’s still good. Although we’ll probably kill each other before our first hop’s over. I’m willing if you are.”

“To kill me? I think you’ll have to get in line.” He flexes the leg, not looking at her.

There’s a silence, and she waits.

“If you tell me what you want me to do, I’ll tell you if I can do it.” He sounds nervous, “I’m a fast learner. I’ve done nothing but navigate and plan mining missions for the last forever, but I can give anything a crack, if you cut me enough slack to learn it. I’ve no idea about weaponry. You’ve got a gun turret down there, but frankly, if they’re that close, it’s probably too late anyway unless this ship’s got some serious acceleration potential, and you’d have had to build it, out here there’s no engine spares to swap in, am I right? I’m right, aren’t I. Because you’ve the boredom threshold of a gnat, from the way you write, and from the fact that you sought out the only position that could give rise to a war with Earth. So. The thing I don’t know is what you’re going to do with a Tamsin without her Cantor, because that boy’s still a boy. Younger in the head than when I met you first and let’s not pause to remember how that worked out. Oh look, it’s your judgment face. I remember that one all too well, you can cut it out. He’s going to stick with his mother, and she’s going to stick with her insane Earther bastard of a quartermaster, and in about a couple of hours they’re going to come along that dark rim with whatever high explosive Salve’s saved for Verde, and they’re going to try to blast this ship open. How long was I out?” 

He doesn’t pause for her to answer, but looks at his watch instead. “Strike that. Tamsin’s got a very limited window here to get off this ship, if she’s going to, and we’ve got a very limited window to get off this rock, if we’re going to. My strong recommendation to you, Captain, is that we put her ashore, and we cut loose, if we’re provisioned.”

That seems to be the lot. He’s waiting on her now.

She doesn’t have an answer. She’s been waiting for one to arrive, fully formed and ready to action in her head for some time now, as it usually does and it’s been disobliging in the extreme by not appearing. 

“Tamsin’s an unknown. She hasn’t said if she wants to leave or not, and I can’t just blast off and make that decision for her. Can I? My aunt’s an unknown. I can’t cut and run now, with one and not the other. I can’t leave them here, in good faith, if you think Verde’s coming for her. Hay’s not going to let him march up and start laying down the HE. Forget Hay, PortAuth’s not going to.”

He’s shaking his head, hair flicking back and forward. He needs a haircut she’s not going to give him.  
“Hay can’t control him. He’s got half the crew in his pocket. Man who controls the rations and all that.”

She shrugs, the movement carrying her back forward towards him. Unintentional. “You forget. You’re not on the Styx. You’re in our port. You’re on Vesta. All those things he said about the folk on this station being hardline, being ruthless? He wasn’t wrong. I don’t know what they’re waiting on, is the only thing. You met Chen, right? And he said they were investigating? Hay plays her cards right, once her ship’s fixed, she’ll be allowed to leave if she pays her debt. Which, incidentally, would be useful to us, because I’m owed a chunk of it, and it’ll help keep the lights on and the oxygen levels up. Hay doesn’t, well, then, PortAuth has a view about salvage that’d make Cornish folk blanch. I guarantee you, PortAuth watched you as closely as I did, and if you’d looked like you were carrying HE, you wouldn’t have made it to my door. They’re really friendly when they’re provoked.”

“So,” he says, rocking back on his heels, suppressing the wince.

“Exactly. So. We let it play out. Tamsin can do what she likes, but I’m not leaving unless and until Verde’s gone. One way or another.”

She makes it back to the door, the cool metal under her fingers before she remembers to say it. “You’re not unemployed. I don’t know what you’re employed as, but you’re crew. An honorary Dog.”

His face isn’t a bad one, particularly when he’s smiling like that, and she can remember the night she first met him, without the rancour that usually attaches.   
“An honorary Dog? How many of those are there?”

She tries not to smile. She tries to keep a straight face, like that of a Captain Hay, like that of her aunt Juan.   
“Including you?”

He nods, waiting.

“One.”

He whistles through his teeth.  
“Not much.”

“It better be enough. Come on, Styx. You’ve been telling me the stories for years. Time to come good.”

He takes a breath in, and she can see his eyebrow quirk up, and she’s waiting to hear the next rejoinder, with entirely too much interest. She’s watching his mouth with entirely too much interest, and she’s pretty sure he knows it too. She swallows.

“I want to go home,” Tamsin says from the corridor behind her.  
Her head snaps around so quickly that the rest of her body has no choice but to follow suit, rookie error. 

“I mean, thank you for giving me the bolthole, but I don’t want it. It’s a very nice ship, Ben. It is. I’m staying on Vesta.”  
Tamsin’s eyes are clear, and she’s back in her suit, helmet in her hand. Breathing regular, and no trace of the last 24 hours on her face.   
“I’m not running from anything. Come on back and have a meal, wish her goodbye. Make a decision after some food. Next thing that’s going to happen, if you take the panic lens off, is that PortAuth’s going to come asking where everyone was, and best if you’ve got an answer together before then. Come on, and eat. It won’t necessarily be good, but it’ll be better than what’s on this ship. Guaranteed. If I can eat, then so can you. Pick up your feet.”

She lets go of the door frame. “Don’t sneak up on a body like that. It’s not good for my blood pressure.”

“There was no sneaking. I made as much noise as I possibly could. Not my fault if you don’t pay attention. Doesn’t bode very well for your time out in the black. Sort yourselves out.”

She’s grateful that he can’t see her face, because her jaw’s dropped. Then she remembers that she’s meant to have been swept off her feet, although she’s not sure why she’s pretending at the moment, or who for. She can feel the air move around her before she feels the heat of his body behind her. And then the warmth of his body around her.   
“Sorry. I can be very distracting when I try, and I was trying. I’m sorry about your mother, Tam. I’m sorry about Cantor. I’ve a stack of canned platitudes that I use at a time like this with the crew, but I don’t think you’re the sort of person who likes canned things. Give us five to put the gear back on and we’ll be with you. Meet you in the airlock and don’t open the door until we’re there.”

She can feel the rumble in the chest behind her, and it’s bracing. She does the melting into the body of the human behind her thing, because that’s what people in love, or at least in lust, do, and he shifts his body to accommodate it. Tamsin makes a face.   
“I’ll give you 10. After that, I’m heading out and whatever happens to me in your absence is on you and your hormones.”

Ben tries to stifle a smile, but she can hear the laugh behind her, not even pretending to hide.  
“Sorry, Tam.”

“Whatever.”  
Tam disappears into the corridors. 

“I’ll get your suit,” she says, but his hands are on her waist, and she doesn’t move. “Come on, let’s go,” she says, but he doesn’t move either.   
She can feel the moment dragging out too long to pretend that it’s not. Pushes against the doorframe, so that she turns inside his arms, to face him, and on the basis that this might as well happen, looks up.

“Since she’s gone,” he says, “in case you need it, I’m your alibi.”  
Which is not what she was expecting. She was half expecting the tilt of the head, and the slow leaning down, and the meeting of lips, and a hand around the back of her neck, and the arch of her back, and a loss of gravity. Half looking forward to it. Half biting her lip in anticipation of it. 

“My alibi.”

“PortAuth is going to narrow down a time slot. That time slot’s going to contain movements of people who were working on the Styx, and people who were accessing it, and it’s going to contain you. You didn’t do it, of that I’m sure. Verde’s going to be throwing accusations around thick and fast. If one sticks, I’m your alibi. We were here, in your sleeping quarters, and whatever you remember of me of that night, that’s all fair game. I owe you that, at least.”

“Debts are all paid, Pod. It’s in the past. You don’t owe me anything.”

He half moves forward, half closes the gap. “I beg to differ. Even what I remember of that night, I owe you whatever you want. Just take it. Please.”  
He’s definitely looking, at least, at her lips. She can feel the breath in her chest, shallow. His arms are still at her waist, and the warmth from his hands is burning through her flannels. 

“Okay.”

“Okay.”

There’s a silence then, and she wants to say, if you’re going to kiss me, come on and kiss me. But she doesn’t, and she’s not sure why.

“We should go to the sleeping quarters,” he says finally. “Or I should, and you should get your suit from the deck.”

He winces as she pushes free, and she can feel the twinge as if it were her own. 

“You shouldn’t come, you’re still raw. If a medic saw you, they’d strip you a new skin,” she says, holding his suit, steading him.

“My body, my rules,” he says, “unless you care to make it a captain’s order.”

The laugh’s involuntary. “You’re telling me that I make it a captain’s order, and you stay.”

“That’s exactly what I’m telling you. Of course, I’m going to have feelings about it. I have feelings about everything. I’d save the orders for when you really need them. I think a couple more hours on the stump’s not going to kill it. I’ve had worse.”

If she thinks about it too long, she’s going to flip out. She chooses not to. 

“Understood. It’s not an order. You’re a grown adult. I think you need your head read, but we don’t have time. Your read is we go to the refrect, and spend an hour. In that time, PortAuth will have finished reviewing the tapes, and narrowed down the timeslot. Then they’ll come knocking on doors and running the search. I know it’s not me, and I know it’s not you because you were nowhere near the hull. I don’t know it’s not Tam, but I’m betting it’s not. You’re betting it is Verde, and I’ve got no reason to doubt you. On this.”

He’s not even pretending that he’s not looking at her mouth now, and she can feel his chest through her hand on his flannels, his pulse strong. 

“You’re asking why we’re not just setting up Verde for the fall now? Why we’re waiting for PortAuth to figure it themselves?” 

She nods. 

“Sometimes, Vesta, you have to let the course do the work. You and I take a lead on this, we’re flagging ourselves as worthy of paying attention to in the future. You want to keep the network up, you have to keep mum on this. For now. On this. Your call, but that’s my strong suggestion of the course to follow.”

His eyes flick back up to meet hers, and she says yes, but she’s not really answering the question. His lips, when they meet hers, are soft this time, and it’s infinitely better to kiss him without the bulk of the outer suit in the way, because she can feel the length of him and the way he moves against her, and the way she moves back against him, testing the gravity. He’s definitely testing her patience, something, this time, resisting her pull, keeping the kiss shallow, making her chase him, and when he pulls away finally, she’s half expecting a smirk, a triumphant grin, a look what I made you do, but his pupils are as blown as hers feel, and it’s her who reminds him that they’re meant to be walking Tam to the refrect, and there’s suits to put on, against the black and bare of space, and the laugh that he barks then, she’s sure, is at himself. 

She’s expecting Tamsin to be either amused or angry, and instead she’s simply blank, not even a look at a watch to indicate impatience. Ben’s got no toolkit for this.


	33. There is always a reckoning

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He's meant to be on a mission. He's meant to be the one providing the saving. Why, thinks Pod, does it always end up the other way around?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 3 to go - we're in the final movement

The port is extra black, extra quiet, extra cold, as they walk. The port stanchions and the Styx are still intertwined jagged and wrong, and Ben’s watching it as they walk, and he’s projecting that she’s calculating how much in her time has been wasted, how much more time would need to be spent to get it operational, and he wants to tell her to stop, that it won’t be her problem, but the silence fills his head, after all his talking, and it seems wrong to break it again. He can hear in his imagination the crunch under his boots, the crackle of the static buzzing in his earpiece, but there’s no Styx crew waiting, no PortAuth either, and people must still be holed up, all the better for them. 

Tamsin walks ahead, by herself. He doesn’t know Tamsin really, not at all. He knows the picture that Cantor kept beside his bunk, that he imagines is long gone to the black with the blast. He knows the pretty things that Cantor would say about her, a fictional girl with all the world at her fingertips, and all the virtues that could ever be ascribed to a woman throughout the black universe. He knows the stories that Cantor’s shared about her, the lens of longing across the months, but he doesn’t know this quiet determined tall person walking in front of them, shoulders set against the storm that’s anticipated, well contained inside the suit, economical in her movements, nothing wasted. He doesn’t know Vesta, and he doesn’t know them, and he doesn’t know what they’re all capable of. 

When he thinks back, when he tries to remember the plaintext updates from his Vestan contact, from Benita walking beside him that sat beside the coded ones to be passed on, there’s nothing that would lead to anyone from Vesta deliberately blowing the Styx. Nothing about engaging an individual war on Earth trade. Nothing that would have lead to anyone on Vesta trying to kill anyone on Styx, excepting of course, Ben, and the way in which she’s openly expressed a desire for his death. Repeatedly.

Could this be a form of extended double bluff? She’s smart enough, no question. She could be faking it. She could be taking him on board to use him in some sort of elaborate trade off against Styx, and the Verde coalition of the unwilling, if Verde thinks he’s loyal. Which he’s not. It’s worth remembering that, against the way in which she kissed him. The way in which he wasn’t spaced while he was out. The way in which she’d fixed his prosthetic, which hasn’t rubbed at all when before it edged the blood out of his stump in the same distance. The investment seems outsized for the extension. Worth remembering though.

She’s hardedged against the black, silhouetted in the port light, and the light from the stars. He wants to say something dazzling, something ultra-clever, something that’ll make him worthy and his mind’s a blank, and it’s too late, as they reach the port seal, and through the airlock, and the door opens and they’re in atmos again. She takes off her helmet immediately, and she shakes out her hair, and it’s appropriate that he’s staring, he remembers, because he’s meant to be falling, have fallen, to carry this story off, and so he lets himself stare, but only for the second, and only because she’s not looking, and he can feel a smile on his face that he didn’t intend to put there. It’s nice.

Nice momentarily. That’s because people are in the corridor, throngs of them, pushing past each other. Styx striped jumpsuits, mixed in with the nondescript well worn clothes of the Vestans, today in work gear, no festival wear, no masks, nothing of value. Shoulder blocking by the Styx, and right back at them by the Vestans, and he can see Ben walk faster, close the gap between them and Tamsin. Tamsin doesn’t change how she’s walking one iota. There’s a smell about the corridor of sweat, and he swear he feels the fear pheromone seeping through his skin from the outside in. The crowd’s nervous. The crowd’s ready to shift. He’s never been before in a crowd of this many people he doesn’t know, and he doesn’t like it.

There’s a clap on his shoulder, and he turns to find Salve. Salve’s shoulders are back, and there’s an extra badge on his chest, freshly minted, and if he had patience, he’d be twitting Salve about whether he’s been waiting to wear it, kept in his pocket specially for the day on which Verde promotes him to assistant Quartermaster, whether he’d teared up when Verde handed it over, but he’s no patience, not today, not after the last couple of hours’ worth of nonsense. 

“Fair game, Pod,” says Salve, spit flecking his speech, clouding up in front of him briefly before it falls to the ground. 

“There’s no game here to be had, Salve. Run along,” Pod says, as he turns back, because Tamsin’s still moving, and that means Ben’s still moving, and travelling in a pack is safe, and travelling alone in a crowd with an energy like this isn’t. 

Salve’s hand is still on his shoulder, and he can feel it clamp down as he tries to move. As he twists back again, knees protesting, he can feel the punch land on his shoulder, the effect dissipated through the hard spacesuit, and his stomach clenches. It doesn’t hurt exactly, but he’s annoyed, and he lets the annoyed take his fist into Salve’s face, and he’s certain that it’s hurt Salve more than it’s hurt his fist. There’s a whistle blowing, and another, and a siren klaxon sounds, and he doesn’t know what it means. Adrenaline kicks up a notch.

“Turn around and keep walking,” and there’s another voice he can’t quite place, and it’s coming from a direction he can’t track. Salve isn’t taking the time to figure the direction out either, and he swings blindly at Pod’s head, and because Pod’s head isn’t where Salve’s expecting, Salve careers into the random Vestan next to Pod in the corridor, who ricochets into the wall, and then there’s bodies bouncing against each other every which way, and Pod quietly starts to freak out. His fist stings inside his gloves, and his stump aches at the joint, and all he can think to do is keep moving away, away from the tangle, and towards the direction of the refrect, and he can’t see Tamsin and he can’t see Ben, and he tells himself that he’s been in worse situations before, and all he needs to do is keep going, and it’ll be over.

Which works until someone else shoves him, not intentional he thinks later, but he’s still into the side of the corridor himself, and jarring around inside his suit, and his grip hardens on the helmet. He’s not sure anymore whether he’s going in the right direction, the lights have dimmed. Fastens the helmet on, snick snack, because that’s what he’d do if he was on board and lights dim, systems failing and power lost, and it seems to be the right call, because he immediately feels better. It’s possible that PortAuth have bled the atmos to try to cull the crowd energy, or worse, it’s possible that there’s a leak.   
He can’t remember the last time he recharged the suit. He doesn’t know if Ben did when he was out. Worst case scenario, ten minutes or less, after the walk across the rim of the port. Next step has to be getting inside a seal. He skims the surface of the corridor, the part he can see through the helmet plate, and he doesn’t recognise it. There are doors, sure, but they’re doors to individual residences. He can see the door to the train, but that’s not the one that he wants. 

He’s jostled again, from the side, and instinctively starts to move away, but someone has him by the elbow, and he’s being dragged in clean air, no surface to push against, and now the adrenaline’s pumping hard, because he can’t get the right angle to break free. He’s helpless, a rag doll.

He takes in that he’s being dragged through a door, and grabs at the frame, one hand catching it. It’s the same hand, though, that’s stinging from the earlier Salve interaction, and it only holds for a second, and then he’s inside, wherever it is that he’s been taken, and the door shuts in his face, his back to the room. He can see the suited figure lock the door, too. No escape. 

He lands awkwardly, one foot buckling, and the other catching behind it, into the space in the middle of the chamber, gradually drifting down, as the figure turns around. It’s no one he recognises, which means Vestan, but he doesn’t know what else that means. He lands and braces himself. Keeps the helmet on, although the suited figure takes theirs off. 

It’s a man, and he looks annoyed. “Take your helmet off, Podraig, you’re safe enough here. PortAuth wants you alive, though I can’t think why.”

He complies, his gloves only slightly catching on the clasp. The air feels as thin as outside though, and he regrets it almost immediately. It’s a dingy small room that he’s in, the antechamber to something official, there’s notices on the walls, tacked up, an admonition to double check seals every 20 standard hours. A dimmish light in the centre. 

“I’m grateful then, and obliged for the rescue. If you could point me in the way of the refrect, I’d be even more so,” he says, in a voice as even as he can make it.

“You’ll give it a couple of minutes, if you’re wise, flyboy. PortAuth’s clearing the corridors, and then they’ll do a door to door. Since I’ve got you, let’s do it now.”

Pod’s mind goes blank. There’s an imprint of the back of Ben’s hair, the set of her shoulders, hanging in front of his eyes, and it’s all he can see. He can’t remember when he last ate and he recalls that he was meant to do that when they reached the refrect. His mouth tastes sour.

“What do you need to know,” he says casually, turning the helmet over in his hands, weighing it up. It’d be hard enough, if he needed to do something explosive and violent. There’d be consequences though, and he’s not close enough to any ship to make an exit, not in the state he’s in.

“Standards 4 to 6 this morning, you were where?” he’s asked. He can’t remember what the answer’s meant to be. He’s said he’ll stand alibi for Ben, but the hours aren’t ones he’s flagged as likely to be singled out, and they’re the ones for which he actually has an alibi for Ben in any case. It’s after the blast. It’s odd. 

“With Benita from the refrect.” He realises belatedly that he’s never asked for a last name. It seems to be enough, because the PortAuth nods. “I think we were at the refrect for a while, then we were on her ship in dock. The Dog’s Breakfast.”

“I know it.” The PortAuth’s giving nothing away, a blanker poker face than he can muster. He’s glad he has genuinely nothing to hide, because he can’t play this any way other than the truth. He wants to ask why those hours, what they’re looking for, but as long as it’s not him, or her, in their sights, he also wants to leave well enough alone. 

“And standards 4 to 6 yesterday morning, you were where?” 

These are the hours he was expecting. He tells the lie with as straight a face as he can, trying to make his eyes those of a lovesick fool, of someone who’s been shagged six ways to Sunday and back again, those of nothing to hide, and it seems to be enough, because he can see the tension relax between the eyebrows and the crinkles release next the eyes, and the PortAuth chap is half turning away before he even finishes his sentence. 

“Free to go, but if you give it a couple of minutes, you’ll be wise. Tell them, if you’re stopped again, that Brendan’s cleared you. Refrect is up and to the right, thirty metres.” And it’s over, and the guy is gone.

His head swims a bit. He waits the prescribed minute, not keen to be questioned again, and fumbles his way through the door.

The corridor is clear when he exits. Thirty metres seems to be a long way, and his mouth is parched, breathing is hard, when he makes the door. The refrect’s door is locked, and with no expectations, he knocks. It would be the shitty icing on the shitty end of the day if he’s barred here, too. It’s a long way back to the Dog’s Breakfast, and Ben hasn’t given him the passcode.

He’s raising his fist to knock again, when the door opens.

She’s unsuited again, and she’s clearly been crying, which is to be expected, her aunt and all, but her chin quivers when she sees him, and she pulls him hard against her, inside the refrect door, and she doesn’t let him go, and he doesn’t make her, and they drift into the centre of the refrect, a graceful arc back to the floor, her wrapped around his suit, as they fall.


	34. Brave punishments indeed

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ben's lost track of the line between the charade and the real. It's been too long a day, and it's not over yet.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Two chapters to go after this. The only way is up and out!

When the PortAuth knocks on the refrect door, they’re still drifting in a spin in the centre of the room, and it’s Urtz who opens it for them.

This time there’s no questions, although the PortAuth representative does stare hard at the spectacle she’s making of herself. No, the PortAuth is there to invite them to attend the town hall meeting to be held in two hours standard in the PortAuth facility by the dock. Mandatory, she says, as she ticks off a resident list in one clipboard, making sure she captures all the refrect crew, all gathered from the kitchen, the bunking quarters, the laundry, and one tick off the visiting ships list, presumably for Pod. Ticking all done, the PortAuth rep turns and leaves, and Urtz locks the door behind her. 

“He’s okay. Put him down. He needs to eat.” That’s her aunt, from behind her.

“I’m good. This is good,” he says, and she realises he’s still in his suit, and lets him go. Her arms feel empty once he’s out of them. 

Juanita frowns. “Suit off, house rules. You can put it on when we go. By the door, by the rest of ours.”

Ben pulls him back over by the door. She can’t think what to say, beyond the obvious. “I thought you were gone. I turned around once we were here, and you’d disappeared. When the klaxon sounded, I thought you’d been taken. Don’t ever do that to me again.”

He stares at her, still suited. Shakes his head. Starts to pull the suit gloves off. 

“I mean it,” she says, and she’s not meaning for her voice to wobble. It’s been a long day.

The gloves are off, and then the top part. She can see the sweat rings around his armpits, and she remembers about the stump again. Holds her hand out, and he takes it for balance, as he lowers himself to the ground. Wriggles backwards out of the suit legs, the prosthetic coming with him. There’s no more blood that she can see, no more than previously. When she looks back up at his face, he’s caught her looking, and he’s smiling as he tugs her down, and she doesn’t mean to land on his arm, but she’s trying to avoid his leg, and he curls her in. Holds her close. 

“When you’re quite done, Ben. Feed him.” Juanita’s not sounding annoyed, any more. Just tired.

Meg brings him a box of noodles in the end, which he eats one handed, sitting on the floor. The floor’s relatively clean, Ben rationalises. They sweep up and sterilise at the end of every shift. It’s a healthy establishment. 

She rationalises to herself too the fact that she’s being all gooey over Pod on the basis that she’s in shock. Marcia is in the bunking rooms, cleaned, and still, and unbreathing. She’ll be interred into the greenspace in the area that she and Tamsin had agreed on ages ago, when Tamsin was first apprenticed there, and death was only a remote concept for Tamsin, and not recognised as a constant companion. It’s a tradition here, a giving back, to give your body as compost, fertiliser for Vesta, a way of staking a claim on the Belt. Spacing is for those who aren’t wanted. A stand for independence, and there’s no escaping the thought that Marcia was in every inch of her fighting as hard as she could for the concept. She’ll be interred tomorrow, once all who want to have visited. It all makes perfect sense, and yet it’s still hard to face. Tomorrow, she’ll wield a spade, and help to close the dirt over her face, bit by bit covering her, against the instincts that say to stop, that she won’t breathe, on the basis that she won’t breathe anyway. It’s hard to accept. And yet she has to. Instead, she holds onto Pod’s hand, smoothing over the scrapes on his knuckles. Doesn’t think about whether she’s convincing anyone.

Juanita is busying herself feverishly, stocktaking, and tidying, and cleaning walls around them. Tamsin isn’t crying, and she doesn’t have the energy to figure whether that’s good or bad. Tam’s back, and they’re safe for the minute, and Pod’s not dead and that’s good enough for the present.

Pod, annoyingly, scruffs up her hair when he takes the noodle box behind into the kitchen, and Juan doesn’t challenge him about entering it. Like he has a right to be there. Before he uses the refresher, which she has to admit he needs to, although she doesn’t admit that she likes the way his sweat smells, because that’s way too much information for everyone else in the room, he asks if she’s okay if he goes, and it’s not quite clear if he’s joking or not. She feels something about that, something in her chest, and in her cheeks, animal and possessive and she tells him he’s an idiot, and he goes, and she can feel Urtz and Meg looking at her, and she buries her hands in her face. It’s all too much.

Which is all well and good, but she’s a grown adult herself, and she needs to face reality, and make a plan. One that Tamsin doesn’t think is cowardly. One that honours Marcia’s legacy, and the role that she handed down to Ben. One that has a future in it, with enough space for Pod, and she can’t quite look at why she’s happy that he’s off the Styx and an honorary Dog, not for more than a nanosecond, like she’s looking at the sun. 

She’s never been off the rock since she first came here. She’s tested the ship, of course, but not outside close orbit. She’s enough hours in a simulator, because she’s always had an eye for the future, or why else fix her ship, but she doesn’t think she’s worth much as a pilot. Which will need to change. She’s a captain now, or so she’s claimed, although she feels the imposter doing so. She’s digested all the computer courses there are to be found on how to captain a ship, but none of that means anything without a crew. She wonders whether Pod will think she’s worth it, in a year or two, because she has no idea what she’s doing, but it’s too late to stop now. There’s an inevitable collision over this horizon, with this intermediate one for which they’re going to be present, at which someone’s going to be spaced. 

Pod appears, and his hair is neat, and he’s found another flannel jumpsuit that’s not stained, red and blue patchwork, and he’s got himself back in order, and it’s too late to do anything about the fact that she’s not. It’s time to leave.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Two chapters to go after this. Thanks for reading!


	35. Take what you want, and pay for it

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There's always a reckoning, but until you get to the point, it's unclear who is going to pay. That is, until you get to the point. This is the point.

The PortAuth hall is crowded. There hasn’t been a meeting like this, Juanita has said casually to them all, lining up beside the front door, since the time the dome glass was cracked, and they had to discuss how to fix it. That had been before Tamsin was born. There hasn’t been need. People have been spaced, sure, but that’s been nothing that required a whole of colony meeting. Or maybe it had, Podraig thinks to himself, and Vesta hadn’t bothered. Vestans, judging from the past couple of weeks, do more acting first and thinking later. 

Exhibit A, Ben. She appears to have decided that if you’re going to do a thing, you do a thing. You don’t half arse it. She’s not left his side. Walked him back from the shower, and there’s a thing she’s doing with her thumb and his wrist that should be illegal, the effect it’s having. It almost makes him forget the time limit under which they’re operating. Almost makes him forget that it’s a fake. A probable fake. He’s drunk on it, a bit. He’d forgotten the details of her lips, and the way in which her tongue slips out at the side of her mouth when she’s concentrating, the way in which her hair’s a complete mess, little wispy bits sticking out at odd places, her eyebrows an emphasis on her eyes, and the eyes that stare right through him, if he’s not careful, and if he’s not wise and looks too long, freezing him still to not lose them. It’s hard to walk the line between the fake and the fall. He doesn’t think anymore that she’s trying. He doesn’t want to think about whether he is. Or the next moment after it all goes wrong, because he’s gone wrong before, and it’s not great. It’s awful. He can’t see the light go out of her eyes like that again. If it’s in her eyes in the first place. 

Exhibit B, Juan. It’s like she’s a partition up between the anger and grief he saw before, and the determination that she’s going to have justice. That Marcia’s kitchen will live on. That Tamsin will not, by all that is holy, be blamed for that which she did not do. There’s a hardbar behind the bar, and she’s swinging slow, lazy circles, as she talks, as she waits for them all to line up. It looks capable of splitting plexi, of helmet shattering, of escorting someone on the way to black space vacuum and oblivion, and the name she’s muttering is Verde’s. 

He doesn’t know if the act was Verde’s, but he’s betting with Juanita that the moving hand behind the act was Verde’s. Plus, he’s cast his dice on this side of the table, and he’s to stick with it now, he’s off the ship, and on Ben’s, and while he’s tried to suspend judgment, the fact that the blast was on his cabin makes his skin crawl, and his blood run cold, and the judgment’s coming thick and fast aimed at Verde in any case. If he’s being honest with himself, at Hay too. If this was Verde, it’s reasonable to suppose that some of the previous acts were at his command too. Which is how she lost Jy. Which is how the ship was holed. It could have been a trap that he’d been directed to navigate them into, for Verde’s always in the target selection team, and he speaks with a loud voice. Surely, if you were a captain to which that had happened, you’d be suspicious of your own crew first, and Vestans second, particularly those which you’d intended to take on board? Then, there’s Cantor. He’s surprised himself with the anger he feels about that. He’s listened to Cantor for years, stories about Tamsin’s kindness, her gentle nature, her smarts, and the songs about how he yearns for them to be together, indulged him in all of that. All of those songs and all of those promises about how he’ll treat her, his queen to her king, and the universe can go hang, and instead there’s this woman behind him in line waiting silently, no Cantor by her side, waiting to beard the PortAuth hall and hear them, him, call her traitor. He himself is going to do something about that if given the opportunity. Something involving a long and detailed lecture. There may be diagrams and spreadsheets. Whatever it takes to get through the sentimental crap and into the way in which she’s hurting. 

The suits have gone back on. On everyone. No one’s talked about it. Helmets in hand, ready to be clicked on, if things get out of hand. If the seal gets busted. If the Styx crew decides not to allow the brand of justice Vestans want to dispense. 

It’s different walking through the corridor with Vestans. Where the Styx crew takes up space, and crowd their way through in a pack, the Vestans separate, and hug the walls. They slide their feet more, like cats, which is not something that’s available to him. He does his best to keep up, but he’s conscious that they’re having to wait. No one’s turning around and rolling their eyes at him exactly, but Juan makes them pause every fifty metres, and he feels like a kid, but also grateful. Ben’s glove is in his, and the taste of the cinnamon and the nutmeg synths is still in his mouth, and he has a full tank for his suit, and there’s nothing immediately to complain about. It doesn’t feel wrong.

The hall is full. What’s interesting to him immediately is that the crews are mixed. There’s Styx suits, and the suits of the other berthed ships, and the Vestan drab clothes and scruffed up spacesuits, and it’s like a tapestry, looking down from the balcony, a muddy tapestry with no pattern to it. He can’t see Verde, and he can’t see Salve. Hay is there, though, extremely visible. She’s in dress whites, and not an inch of her spacesuit on. It’s admirable, the way in which she’s prepared to face it out. There’s a part of him that’s proud to have been on her ship, despite it all. Another part that wants still to go and stand by her side, and be told that he’s done the right thing in returning. That he has his place in her crew still. The comfort of the known. Ben’s hand in his reminds him of all the reasons why he doesn’t want it. Hay doesn’t even look at him, and it’s a moot point. 

They’re shooed down into the mix. Ben doesn’t let go his hand, squeezes it reassuringly, and he wants to tell her that he’s fine, not to worry about him, to hold Tamsin’s hand, but he selfishly keeps it.   
PortAuth’s up on the balcony opposite. There’s a bank of them, and they’re all suited up too. He can see that one at least has a weapon. Which is not necessarily as reassuring as he’d like it to be, because he knows that Salve carries one also. Wherever he is. There are too many people in this hall for that to be a good outcome. 

There’s static, and a squeal of feedback, and the mike switches on. PortAuth Chief Chen steps up, towering over the mike, taller than the Styx crew, taller than most of the Vestans, and the hall quiets. He can hear the sound of the airconditioning, the hiss and the beat of the fans in the extraction shafts. There’s pressure on his hands, and he squeezes back. Juan stands on Ben’s other side, arms folded, Tam in front of her, hands hanging loosely, looking dead on her feet.

“PortAuth has completed its investigations.” The room silences even further, and he swears he can hear Ben breathe.

“We have reviewed the footage from our port cameras. We have spoken to all the people we consider to be relevant to our investigations. A decision has been reached.”

He can feel Ben’s hand gripping his, for her comfort now, rather than his. Juan’s arms tighten and he can hear her suit creak. Tamsin looks momentarily awake.

“Watch with us,” Chen says. He turns, and fumbles with the controller, mumbling under his breath, until he’s found the setting he’s looking for. There’s a screen that comes to life, at the other end of the hall. 

It’s grainy black and white footage, no sound. At first, there’s no movement, and the lights of the stars beyond seem to be burning out of the screen. He’s trying to think of something funny to say, break the tension, when he sees the movement. He can see people stirring on their feet, at the same time, a ripple running through the hall. The figure’s clearly in a suit that belongs to the Styx, laden with a backpack. In the hall, there’s noise but when he looks he can’t see which of the throng are making it, Styx or Vestan or both. Chen’s voice tells people to quiet down, but he’s ignored.

There’s another figure he can see, when he looks closely. The figure’s in a Styx suit too, but it’s hanging back under the lip of the wall. He’d bet that the figure’s not certain where the cameras are, and is hoping to be unnoticed. The moving person turns and looks back, and the hider makes a small shooing movement. The mover continues on, towards the Styx. When the figure reaches the airlock, it engages a switch on the boots, and takes a pause before clambering over the side, and walking sideways along the hull, perpendicular to the hull, at odds with the port orientation. The figure stops, and he assumes that this is what the outside of his cabin looked like. Or had looked like. When It was his cabin. When the hull was whole. 

The figure turns and looks to the stationary one. The hider holds up a hand, and points. There must have been audio, and either PortAuth hasn’t caught it, a line of sight narrowcast, or they did and they’ve chosen not to share it. Whichever it is, the moving figure turns back to its task, and lifts the backpack from its back, and reaches in. There’s no hesitation now as it places bar after bar on the hull, securing each fast before moving to the next. 

The figure moves back more swiftly now, dragging the bag afterwards, and flicking it back on to the railing, in advance of the leap over the rail. It’s clearly empty now. All the cargo that was there is gone.   
The screen flickers, and he can see Chen playing with the controller again. The film buzzes on for a bit. There’s bodies that move and go inside, and come back out. He can see himself, he thinks, at one point. He definitely sees Ben, a handful of times. The film slows again, beyond normal speed into one fifth, one tenth. He can see the ship erupt, the parts flowering out and into the stanchion, and it’s so violent that he pulls Ben into him, unthinkingly. He’s never been fond of the battle parts of the battles. The plotting in and out, and the moving around the chess pieces, fine, but the bits where there’s damage actually being wrought, not his scene. 

Chen is fiddling again, and reverses the footage, at the same slow speed. There’s an enlarge function that he’s playing with, and as the footage plays in reverse, the damage getting smaller, the parts unflowering and weaving together, it’s very clear that the origin of the explosion is the bars that were laid by the moving figure. Chen pauses the footage at the instant where it starts, just to make the point.

Ben’s holding the waist of his suit now, he realises, when he looks down, she’s gripping his waistband, like an anchor. He’s not complaining.

He looks back up, and the footage unspools further backwards, too fast to watch, and back at the original zoom distance, until it reaches the beginning. Chen moves it forward again, like an obsessive dad with a video camera obsessed with each and every frame, until the moving figure turns towards the camera. Enlarges. And enlarges, and enlarges. And sharpens. 

The face in the helmet’s faceplate is Salve.

A swarm of motion breaks the quiet of the hall, a shout that spreads from a point mid back centre of the hall, a surge of bodies, and Ben leans back into him, and they move as one in the school of fish that the people in the hall have become, and they ride the surge, moving to avoid the crush. When the motion dies, Salve’s on the platform, being held, arms behind his back. His head twisting and turning, not to get free but searching. Chen is looking out into the crowd too, but he’s found what he’s looking for, and Podraig is no longer in a place where he can see anything at all. He can’t see Juanita or Tamsin. He can’t see Captain Hay. The only person he knows for certain their whereabouts is Ben, and that’s only because she’s tethered onto him by her wrist. Chen’s waiting, it seems, for something or someone to happen. So’s Salve, somewhat less patiently, struggling against his holds. 

“It’s not me, It’s not. You’ve got the wrong – “ Salve is spitting out. “Tamsin, she’s the one. You need to find her. It’s not me, that was nothing, that means nothing. It’s that witch.”

There’s a shout from the back of the hall, and Pod snaps his body around, he knows that voice, too well. “Don’t you dare,” Cantor shouts, “Take her name out of your mouth, you, you utter slime mould.”   
Benita lets his waist go, and Pod grabs for her hand, doesn’t make it. “Stay with me. Let it play out. She’s safe,” he hisses. She doesn’t come back. She doesn’t go any further.

Salve’s still on the platform, still struggling. 

Cantor’s forcing his way through the suits and the clothed like a fish swimming upstream, slowly and with great difficulty, because there’s not much room, and Pod has no idea where Tamsin is, what she’d make of it, but Ben is breathing as hard as if she’s doing the work. She’s watching intently. There’s nothing he can do, one way or another, and the goings on, on the platform, are continuing regardless. 

“Our footage is clear. You’ve endangered your crewmates, Vestan workers, and caused significant damage to the port infrastructure. However,” and PortAuth Chen pauses. Salve stops struggling. There’s a world of hope in the word however, and he’s clutching at it.

“However, you’ve killed no one. There’ll be no spacing here tonight, if,” and the dramatic pause again, Pod hadn’t thought Vestans went in for tension quite this much, for an asteroid with no jury system and no amateur dramatic society, ”you co-operate with us. You’ve made an accusation tonight. Do you have any proof against Vestan citizen Tamsin?”

He can see Tamsin now, because Cantor’s found her too, and is standing between her and the stage, arms outstretched, not seeing that behind him Tamsin is arms crossed, rolling her eyes. Unworried.

“I,” Salve starts. Stops again. “She’s been on board. She’s left things on board. It could have been on board. I was just checking on the patching. Explosion could have been on the inside. Everyone knows it’s the quiet ones you have to watch. She’s not a true citizen. What’s she ever done for Earth? That’s where our real loyalties should lie, is what Verde says, right Verde?” 

Pod can see Verde now, at the foot of the stage. Sneering at Tamsin, past Cantor’s shoulders. To give Tamsin credit, she stares him down as if she’d found a slug in her green patch and was looking for salt. Verde climbs the stairs, slowly, heavy foot, by heavy foot, emphasising the push down past the minimal pull of gravity. 

Chen watches him, impassive. Straight as a steel girder that hasn’t been bent by an HE blast. Chen must surely know, Podraig thinks. Chen’s waiting for Verde to put his foot into it himself. 

There’s a gap between Ben and him now, and he steps up closer. Just in case.

“What I say,” Verde speaks into the microphone that Chen has handed him. “Is that Tamsin’s not the one to do anything that doesn’t benefit herself. She’s not interested in Earth. She’s not interested in doing the right thing. She’s going to do what suits her best. That makes her dangerous, but she’s not the one.”

Podraig can’t see anymore what’s happening with Cantor and Tamsin, the crowd’s closed around them, but he can feel Benita relax back into this body, and he rubs the arms of her suit, ineffectually.   
“I can give you a better name than that. And I will. But first I’d like to address this fine assembly.” 

Podraig’s nervous again. Verde’s one for speeches, broadcast through the ship. Every Sunday, regular as clockwork, like he fancies himself a preacher, and just as fervent as one too. Sometimes on topics as innocuous as putting time to good purpose and calling for volunteers for an improvement project or other, the deep cleaning of the galley fans, the proper rationing of the spices, always in short supply. Sometimes on topics that he really shouldn’t be speaking, on morality, and loyalty, and the right way to lead your life, an appeal to an higher power. On the worst Sundays of all, every third one or so, about how nothing comes without Earth’s blessing, and hubris and the downfall of the first Mars colony, and he generally switches off after that. 

“I look around at you all, and I see you all mingling, Styx crew, and the crew of the independent Christo, and the crew of the Forest’s Name, and the crew of Mars ship Faustus, and Vestans, and I think to myself, where will this end? This struggle against what we all know to be right.” 

It’s a third Sunday, and Pod’s not sure where he’s going with it. 

“What we know to be right is that we owe a duty to mother Earth. We owe our first duty of loyalty to mother Earth, and those who serve her truly. We none of us would be here if it were not for her. Every piece of technology. Every fungus vat. Every recycler, every synth, every processor, all of these things we owe a duty for. Our first duty has to be to our mother.”

Podraig can hear muttering, spacesuits behind him, words like “I’ve never been to Earth, never taken her coin, don’t owe her squat,” and “No such thing as a first duty of loyalty. Space takes that, you fool,” and voices that echo the loyalty bell themselves, and he’s not certain whether the voices calling for loyalty are from Styx or the other crew, or from Vesta, and he’s unsure how this will unfold. He’s never been in a hall to watch the reaction unfold. Which it is. He can feel bodies pushing up against him again, a surge. On the platform, Chen is watching Verde perform, Verde’s hands waving at the crowd like a conductor, Salve to one side now, still in the hold of PortAuth personnel.

“And those who spread words of treason, who plot against our mother, who pour the poisonous word of independence against all the good that we have from Earth, what do I say should be the fate of those people?”

A voice shouts “Death,” and Podraig can see the smile form on Verde’s face, like a kindergarten teacher unexpectedly given a correct answer.

“That’s right. A person who gnaws away at the heart of us, who sends secret messages, designed to break that bond of mother love, that person is the one, PortAuth Chief Chen, that is he who you should space tonight. I promised you a name, and I will give it: Podraig.”

He can feel the cold travel down from his throat to his gut and down to his feet, and he releases Benita from his arms. He’s expecting a heavy hand on each shoulder from a PortAuth suit, and to be marched up to the platform, but it doesn’t come.

“Podraig has sent messages here clandestinely, to a Vestan contact, over years, and I finally have the proof, because this time, the fool’s sent them while we’ve been on rock and I could catch him in the act. Salve, the messages to PortAuth Chen, if you would.”

He feels like he’s watching a dream unfold. Ben’s grabbed his arms again, and is holding them tightly about herself, but he can’t feel them, it’s like they’re puppets that belong to another person, disengaged. On the stage, Salve shakes himself free of the hands that hold him, and fumbles in his pocket for his comms, and taps at it until Chen’s comm flashes, and Chen is tapping at his now, and words appear on the screen, above the enlarged face of Salve, across the faceplate.

“Ah, Vesta, you fool. The risk is the reason to run.”

Podraig sets his feet firmly on the ground. He can see on either side that there’s no end of bodies between him and the door, and even if there were, there’s no place to run to that within reach, her ship is simply too far. 

“Here is the proof, from his own hand. Clearly conspiring against me, with an aim to destroying the poor Styx, and my mission. Space him now, before he can succeed. That’s how Vesta works, yes? No trial, no gaol, just the vacuum? What other possible argument can he raise that will save him now? Space him now, in the name of Earth.”

That’s it, he’s cooked. Boiled and done.

Then, he feels laughter from Ben. She’s shaking and he doesn’t understand. It’s not funny, and Verde has him, and Vesta’s going to let it happen, and Ben’s laughing.

“Quartermaster Verde,” and Benita has a piercing voice when she needs it to be. “Only a man as lacking in humanity as you could possibly think those messages could be about Earth, Earth has nothing to do with it. Use your eyes, you fool. We write messages to each other while we’re apart, and how is that a crime? The one with the first right to call for his spacing is me, as every Vestan, and every Styx crew can tell you true. I’ll tell you that now again, the only one who gets to kill him is me and we all know the reason for that. Now you tell me the last time you had a bed that was warm, and then tell me if it was talking about Earth that got you there. Or has it been so long that you can’t remember how this works?”

There’s a murmur about them, spreading like she’s thrown a pebble into a ball of water, bouncing back off the walls, and back again, and there’s nothing the Styx folk love more than a good clandestine love affair, particularly one a little twisted, and theirs is nothing but. He can feel her solid in his arms, or he’d think it a dream. 

On the stage, Chen’s trying to keep the poker face rigid, but Pod swears there’s a hint of a smile. Verde is waiting for the crowd to hush, and Podraig knows this isn’t over.

“That is, indeed, a pretty story, spacerat. I hate to break it to you, but he’s a berth in every port that he talks to in the same way as you. Don’t you, Pod?”

He’s flushing now, because it’s half true. If he claims it, the alibi holds, and he shames her in front of every person on Vesta, after she’s thrown herself into space to rescue him. Before he’s decided what degree of cad he is, she’s tightened his arms around her, and she’s speaking again. “I know about them all. No business of yours. Chen, end this.”

There’s sufficient noise once Ben stops speaking so that Chen can’t be heard, even with the microphone, the noise bounces around the hall, and he can see suited folk put their helmets on, either against a peace gassing or against the noise, he can’t be sure, but he doesn’t much care. She’s saved him, again, and the very least he can do is play the grateful fool who deserves it, and he kisses the top of her head, sweaty hair and all. She’s very real inside her suit, in a way that she’d never been in the chat, but somewhat less predictable.

On the stage, there’s a scuffle breaking out. There’s only one PortAuth body on Salve, but that’s enough to hold him fast. There’s four on Verde, he’s always been big, and the four of them aren’t really sufficient, but it’s enough to hold him for the moment. Then there’s cable ties, and Verde’s hands are fastened behind his back. 

Chen turns back to the crowd. “Verde spoke truth about the Vestan way. What I said for Salve stands for his master. No life was taken, so we’ll not take his. However, Captain Hay, this is your man. We’ll hold him and Salve for you, until your ship is rebuilt. Then we’ll thank you to take him off our hands, and what you do with him from there is your problem. Collect him when your ship is ready.”

There’s a pause, and a hubbub of noise, but when he scans the hall, it’s only the crew who are vocal, assuming it’s at an end, that that’s that. The Vestans are waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Chen brings up a spreadsheet on the main screen.

Clears his throat.

“As you’ll see, we have itemised the damage that your man has caused to the Vestan infrastructure. This figure, below, is our calculation of the direct losses caused by his action, in that our dock will be unavailable for ship traffic, after your ship, and the others berthed here, launch, for a period we have estimated conservatively at 40 standard days, allowing for work to be completed during normal business hours. Before your ship is released, or for that matter, repaired, we will require this amount to be deposited in immediately available credits in the Vestan account. All other ships, we will require you to make launch as soon as practicable, to allow sufficient space for us to complete our work on the infrastructure, as best we can until the Styx departs. That is all.”

With that, he switches off the screen, nods to his PortAuth suits, men and women all, who march Salve and Verde out the back, and firmly shut the door behind them. 

The silence lasts not a millisec until there’s shouting and clamour, and Podraig gathers that this doesn’t happen too often either, and frankly, he’s a little frightened by it, the noise, the people, the crush.   
There’s people moving around all sides of them now, and he tries to have them ride it, like a wave, out the door, but he rides them the wrong way, and they’re trapped at the bottom of the stage. He’s lost sight of everyone but Ben now, the people streaming around them for the exit, and he braces his arms about her, until she twists about, and looks up at him. 

“Versimilitude?” she asks, and he laughs, a short nervous bark of a laugh. Her lips are soft, and warm, and he wants, he really wants, closer than the suits will allow, sandwiched together and made of ungiving material, and more private than this hall will allow, bodies pushing past them, and out the exit. Privacy for talking, would probably also be a good idea. First. 

There’s a tap on his shoulder. When he’s released, and turns, he wants to punch the smug face in, but there’s no room, and it’s hardly the time or the place. And Tamsin’s with him.

“You know how to keep a thing under wraps, don’t you?” Cantor sing songs at him, “Sly dog, you. Here was I thinking this was a recent thing, and it’s none of the kind. Ben, my commiserations. He snores, you know.”

He turns back, in time to catch the last part of Ben rolling her eyes. “Ship or refrect? Captain’s choice.”

Tamsin speaks instead, but he’s not turning around again. “I’d be obliged if you’d join us at the refrect. I think there are some things to discuss, don’t you?”  
Ben doesn’t look at him when she agrees, but she takes his hand as they leave, and that’s better than he’d hoped for, so much so that the jarring of the steps doesn’t register.


	36. Right round

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In every end there is a beginning

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And that's a wrap. Thanks for reading! Thanks for coming on the ride with my two idiots and the rock in space. I had a ball researching space colonies, and it was good exercise for the grey matter to put it to use.

The refrect is almost peaceful by comparison, Juan’s synced up the most soothingest of mellow synth sounds, and she’s dimmed the lights almost to the point of a sleeping compartment. When she looks about the room, she sees couples, almost exclusively in Vestan clothes, there’s calming lavender scent in the air, and you’d never know, unless you had been here a day prior, of the turmoil that had filled the room. Of the panic she’d felt.

Still feels, looking at Tamsin, or, for that matter Podraig. She’s not going to meet his eyes for a little while yet. 

Cantor is being overly solicitous, she feels, there’s a great deal of handing Tamsin up to the stool, and hopping behind the bar to find the coldest bulb, is she too warm, too cold, and Ben is seized with an urge to accidentally on purpose bump Cantor to the furtherest corner of the room, but that’s a child’s trick, and she’s outgrown all of those. She settles for accidentally on purpose catching his elbow as he tips the bulb up, and the spice liquor dresses his chin, instead of his mouth. She apologises, of course, for any upset of feelings he might be experiencing, and she knows Pod is looking at her, dying to mock the pretence of an apology she’s given, so she busies herself with cleaning it up instead. It’s her mess, after all.

Podraig breaks the ice, as is the way of a man who can’t help himself but talk. “Nice to see you out of your mother’s apron strings, Cantor. Tight, were they? Made of iron and you with no saw to cut through? Easy enough for you to stand behind your woman now, then what was holding you back before?”

Cantor looks at Tamsin. She looks back, stonefaced. 

“I can only offer you an apology, if you thought I was anything less than what I should have been.” Cantor says, in the quiet voice Podraig’s only heard him use before with his mother.

Ben trades a look with Podraig, and then can’t seem to shift his eyes, because she knows he knows what she’s thinking. 

Tamsin, in less quiet tones, “You are apologising for my thoughts? That’s no apology at all. I think not. I’ve had time and space enough to think, Cantor. My thoughts are these: I would rather stay here, and nurture this ungiving rock, cajole it into a harvest or two that will nourish those who chose to stay here, than take my chances with a man who doesn’t know what he wants and is unwilling to stand by me. Even my sharp tongued cousin here can do better than that. Your visits are welcome, as are your songs, but until you’ve found a backbone of your own, don’t waste my time.”

She pushes herself away from the stool, taking the bulb with her. Disappears into the back. Leaves Cantor watching her, open mouthed. 

Ben’s aware that Podraig’s still watching her, but there’s nothing she can do for it now. “Finish your drink,” she advises Cantor. “Then there’s the door. I wouldn’t come back, not this trip. There’s rooms by the dock. Oh, and anything of Tamsin’s that you find that hasn’t been lost to the black, bring it back here and give it to Urtz. Or Meg. Or Brian. Or Juanita. Don’t try to see her again. Not this time. Understand?”

Cantor shuts his mouth. Hands her the half drunk bulb. There’s a lens forming in front of his eyes, and Ben feels almost sorry for him. Almost except that she’s as wrung out as a sponge after the adrenalin burst of the hall, and claiming Pod in front of God and the vacuum. Cantor looks to Podraig, and Podraig says less than a word, a fine imitation of a statue, and Cantor takes it without argument. Doesn’t hold out his hand for a shake. Doesn’t ask Podraig to come back with him. One foot extended, he pushes back, and floats back across the room, and makes it in three. Then he’s gone. 

“That’s your judgmental face, is it?” she asks of Pod, who is still watching her, mouth pursed, and eyebrows furrowed. “The one where you cast up whether all of this bluffing came off, whether it’s worth it to have kept the channels open? Now that you’re stuck on the Dog’s Breakfast for the indefinite?”

“My judgment face,” says Pod. “No. This is my can we stop talking here in the refrect yet and go to your ship, captain, face. Please.”

Which is a lot. To process. She can’t stop looking at his lips. Her jumpsuit feels tight, under the spacesuit, and she remembers she hasn’t washed in the last 48 standard hours. She can’t actually recall sleeping, although she does remember eating, before Pod surfaced from the land of nod. And there was the ultimatum from PortAuth, ships to leave, before port can be fixed. She’s operating, probably, under a countdown before PortAuth comes and kicks her out. 

Juanita stands at the kitchen door. “A word, Benita, before you go. You can leave your suit on, this one time. Now come. You, Podraig, have earnt one more drink on the house, and you will sit there while you drink it.”

She touches his face, awkwardly, with the gloves, as soft as she can make it. It’s not exactly a smirk that he’s making, but it’s not a judgment face either. He’s waiting for her.

In the galley, she is enfolded, awkwardly, into her aunt’s arms, and she can feel her aunt patting her hair, and she doesn’t mean to be crying, but she is, and from the way in which her aunt is heaving her chest, she’s not alone. 

“I have the frequency, and I know where the transmitter is. When you go, I will pass the messages on, for you, and for my Marcia, and for her sister your mother. And you,” she chokes on the word, “You will take care of yourself, now that you have your ship, and someone who is loyal to you in the way you’ve always deserved. Do you know, that ignorant fool of a captain, she offered me Verde’s job? As if I would ever leave here. Give up on the beautiful dream of the diamonds in the stream that these asteroids could become, that is what Marcia called them once upon a time, when she had more space in her lungs to say it. And now you will go out and continue the dream of freedom.”

There’s nothing to say to that. She kisses her aunt on both her cheeks. She thinks about telling her aunt that she hasn’t a clue, not a plan, or even the start of one, of how she’s going to make her way, and then thinks better of it.

Podraig’s drink is finished. There’s a stray drop at the edge of his mouth, and before she talks herself out of it, she rescues it with her mouth. She can taste his sweat through the whiskey.   
When she pulls away, he’s looking at her like it’s that night, all those years ago. A look of quizzical wonder, and she should have known back then what she was dealing with. So should have he. They should have been more careful. There’s no one watching them this time either, and there’s no reason for the dove eyes he’s throwing her way now, none.

Halfway along the corridor, she tells him the plan, helmet to helmet, radios off. To his credit, he doesn’t immediately tell her she’s crazy. Or remind her that if the blast took out the hull wall, it’s likely to have damaged the synth beyond repair. Points out that if they pull off her plan, which was likely Tamsin’s old one, they’ll have succeeded in disrupting Earth’s stranglehold on the supply, and Ben’s embarrassed to admit that she didn’t actually think that far, but she does admit it, for the sake of hearing his laugh again. It’s a good laugh, and it’s a good look on him, and it carries the act of the paired off secret lovers all the way down to the port. 

At the port, the Styx is under guard. However, the guard’s Matteus, and Matteus turns out to be a sucker for a good love story, and is sufficiently sentimental to believe that Podraig needs one last thing, and lets them aboard. 

Knowing that there’s no one else aboard the behemoth is slightly disturbing, turning corners on corridors, expecting to greet crewmates, fellow mechanics bearing tools, people coming off shift, and there being no one, repairs being tool down until Captain Hay sorts out the financials, is eerie. Useful, but eerie. They’re not talking to each other either, helmets on, and aware that the CCTV is likely still on, even if the life support’s off. 

The corridor’s twisted, just as she remembers. 

The door to Pod’s old cabin is perma-open now, at least until someone repairs it. They search it as quickly as the suited gloves allow, Cantor’s bed half out and half in the hull, Podraig stashing several memory sticks in his outer pockets, and cursing himself for a clumsy fool, but there’s no bulky piece of equipment that could possibly fit the bill. 

“It wouldn’t be here, though,” says Podraig aloud, and it’s startling after all the silence, and she shakes her head at him. Makes an exaggerated shrug. He points at the entrance again, and moves. She follows, somewhat bemused. 

The corridors, as they move further away from the wrecked cabin area, change up. They become solid and straighter, and once they pass a door seal into the next level, cleaner. There’s a sign on the wall, married quarters, and Pod’s thinking becomes clearer.

There’s passcode entry, but Pod’s certain as he enters the six digits, the numbers equating to Tamsin, and the door opens. Cantor’s always been predictable in his singlemindedness, and oblivious to how Tamsin’s feelings on the subject. What kind of a person wants to enter her own name as her passcode every time? It’s certainly not Tamsin. The room’s no bigger than the other cabin, but there’s a drop down crib. A space for shared clothes, shared possessions. One big mirror, one big bed instead of two, and she can’t be sad for Tamsin, not now, when she needs to focus on finding what Tamsin must have left behind. Podraig is looking at the bed, and she’s fairly certain that the face he’s making now is the judgment one, and she doesn’t have time to tease him about it. 

They find it in the closet, not even hidden. It takes up a good half of the clothing space, but Tamsin’s never been one to care about her clothes, in part because she looks good in them all, but also because she doesn’t care. If it doesn’t grow, she’s not interested. 

It’s not heavy in the low grav, but it is bulky. And obvious. The cameras will be off in the dorms, but on in the corridors, and definitely on in the port. Pod confiscates a bedspread, and Ben a pillow, and they bundle it up between themselves, look, nothing to see here, just taking what’s ours, it’s all good. Or at least all innocent until the footage is reviewed later, if ever, if at all.

It fits neatly into the Dog’s green room. Hums to life, undamaged, protected by the lack of proximity to the blast. Tamsin has not left instructions. Tamsin has not left a user manual. Tamsin’s programming is brutal in its lack of assistance, and Ben is for a minute daunted. Until she sees Pod’s face, a gleam of interest in his eyes, and thinks better. Turns it off, decidedly, and the synth simmers to a halt, the fans whirring down.

“Later. I suggest later. Later when we’re in the black, and out of grasp. I’m showering, and eating, and then we’re going. Say 20 minutes? Any last messages you want to send to Hay, I’d send them now. We can talk about all this, or we can just get gone, and I’m voting on the going.”

“Fine, let’s get gone. What are your views on marriage?”

She’s in the process of stretching out her back, when he says this, and freezes, and her muscles spasm.

“I don’t think that was something that was in the get off Vesta free plan. Was it? We were using each other for cover, remember? Faking them out. You don’t remember any part of that discussion? That whole speech, in there in that PortAuth hall? All that bit about love? That was the fake bit. Unless I’m losing my memory and or my mind.”

“I think you’ve been kissing me more often than cover strictly requires. I think the fact that we’re talking at all civilly is amazing, and the fact that I know that your sweat hasn’t changed at all in the past decade or so is a miracle. But no, I’m not in love with you at all. This is just one big ruse. I’m not saying that there haven’t been other people along the way, but I’m also not saying that I’m unhappy that you’ve rescued me. Definitely not in love with you. Really wouldn’t want to be stuck on a ship with you and your face and those muscles for the indefinite future. So, yeah. Not saying that we have time, just thought I would vocalise. Thoughts?”

She wants to throw her gloves at him. She wants to kiss him again. She settles for lowering her arms, and pushing him out the door into the entrance hall. There’s more room there, both for throwing, and for other activities. Which they don’t have time for.

“Thoughts? I think you’re a terrible liar. I think you’ve known what you’re doing all this time. It’s your job, after all, to plot the course and navigate. You knew what Tamsin brought on board, and you knew what Verde would do, and you knew how I’d react. How I always react. You’ve been chatting to me for years. And the funny thing is, I don’t even hate you for it. No, actually, I do. I really, really do. In fact, I think you need to stay on board as my first officer for the indefinite future so I can continue to hate you on a close and personal level. Preferably without clothes on. Hence, shower.”

“Suggestion?”

“Literally your job now. First Officer?”

“Don’t shower, let’s just go. I promise, we’ll have time and to spare, just later. We’ll make time. I’ll design you a course that will give us as much as we can. If Verde’s still on that ship when it’s fixed, and Hay doesn’t space him, the more parsecs between us the better. Verde wasn’t aiming at me. That was all smoke. It’s this little beauty that Tamsin’s cooked up that’s going to actually disrupt Earth’s grasp, not the messages we’ve sent. If he gets back on board, the first thing he’s doing is looking for it. When he doesn’t find it, he’ll be looking for her, and then looking for us. Besides,” and he bites the edge of his lip. “I like the way you smell.”

“Mmph.” She bits hers back at him. “It’s a foolish captain who ignores her first officer’s first official suggestion. Although I’m taking the space suit off. Acceptable?”

“Stop flirting and take it off, Vesta.”

He steals covert kisses to the back of her neck in the name of assisting suit removal. Accidental grazes of her inner thighs in removing the pants. There’s a tidal wave of sweat, and pheromones floating off her, and she has to remind him that he said sooner rather than later on the leaving action, when he starts on the waistband of her inner suit, all dark eyes, and single minded fingers. He makes much quicker work on his own outer removal, and they fasten them to the corridor wall. She’ll clean hers later. There’s a lot of things on the later list, not the least of which is his fingers. His tongue.

There’s an unexpected lump in her throat as she runs through the final checklist. The air’s full charged, the refresher’s up to date, fuel topped out and solar panels all showing clear. Nutrient stockpiled for the green room. No flight plan, but Pod’s preparing one as she runs it through, first stop the other side of the Belt, and that’s one that’s preloaded. 

PortAuth sounds overworked, and there’s noise in the background. She can hear Chen barking orders over the top of the port controller, and has to ask twice to hear the all clear for detach. The lump in her throat intensifies as she flicks the switch to break port seal at her end. Presses the button to start the initiator sequence. There’s one more step after that, once the systems are warm, and her fingers hover. It’s been close to fifteen years since the scared kid that she was entered this system, and she’s not scared any more, but it’s still a leaving. She’s watched all the other ships land and take off, from the vantage point of her rock, and dreamed of this day, and now that it’s here, it’s terribly real. Pod’s eyes across the room meet hers. 

“In an hour’s time, you’ll be looking back at this moment, and then in a year’s time, and a decade after that.” Pod says. Gently. “Come on. Take me on an adventure, Ben. Make it a good one.”

She takes the leap.


End file.
